LogFAQs > #898295231

so uh

my hint for 9/8 (and the writeup for it) was actually for 8 and 7

you guys will get over it though

8. Pandemic / Forbidden Island / Forbidden Desert
7. Pandemic Legacy (Season 1)

Genre/mechanics: Cooperative, player movement, hand management, set collection, legacy game (Pandemic Legacy)
Rules complexity: 5/10 (Pandemic, Forbidden Desert), 3/10 (Forbidden Island), 6/10 (Pandemic Legacy)
Game length: 40-60 minutes (Pandemic, Forbidden Desert, Pandemic Legacy), 30-40 minutes (Forbidden Island)
Player count: 2-4 (Pandemic/Legacy/Forbidden Island), 2-5 (Forbidden Desert)
Experience: 10+ plays of Pandemic, 20+ plays of Forbidden Island, 4-6 plays of Forbidden Desert, all of S1 Pandemic Legacy
First played: 2012 (Forbidden Island), 2013 (Pandemic), 2015 (Forbidden Desert), 2016 (Pandemic Legacy)

In Matt Leacock's series of games, you cooperate with the other players to save the world from disease, or explore a sinking island, or save yourself from a desert. In any case, you're generally collecting a set of cards or items to solve the puzzle (to research the disease, or capture cool artifacts, or discover the buried parts to your airplane), moving your pawns across a map, reducing the threat level (infection, flooding, sand dunes). Stall too long and the circumstnaces will overwhelm you.

Pandemic Legacy is among the first Legacy games - a finite campaign experience meant to be played with the same group over multiple sessions. Over the course of one "year," it tells a story about a regular infection in a regular Pandemic game that mutates badly, and the intervention that is needed beyond your usual CDC theming. Characters get upgrades, cards get removed, and the map gets modified over the course of the game; meanwhile, the scenarios can change the goals game-to-game.

Enjoyment - Forbidden Island is the first cooperative game I played, and the first one where I learned it solely through playing by the rulebook. It's the one I've played the most, since I blind-bought it, the simplest, and among the most focused in strategy. It is super-light but has the look and 'experience-ish' feel of a centerpiece game.

So after a while, I ordered Pandemic. And ironically... it only hit the table once at home. It felt physically fiddly to have to put those cubes on each city (and it didn't help that I was stacking them). It was Forbidden Island-esque, but with a less visually appealing design and more text to parse and a grindier, less whimsical feel to it. And I wound up knocking down stacks for the outbreaks, which was annoying. So it didn't get played again until much, much later - at which point I felt it was a great change of pace from Forbidden Island.

Bananagrams was Ground Zero for the hobby gaming for me, and Blood Bound was one of my favorite experiences from that day. But was it a week? or a day? later - that we were invited in a smaller group to play some more games. Forbidden Desert was the final game of the evening, and it felt like a bigger, more interesting Forbidden Island. We played two or three consecutive games that night, and after the "I'm glad we tried that" feeling toward BANG! and Ticket to Ride, this was something that felt immediately gripping... and actually made me want to go deeper.

Pandemic Legacy is the last game I played with the friend responsible for hosting countless game nights before she moved away, breaking up our four-person core. In an era where our most replayed games were Pit and Jungle Speed, scrounging out the time to play a dozen sessions of Pandemic Legacy in three months was quite the experience. We finished December of the game on the floor of her apartment with almost all the furniture packed up.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness