One hell of a send-off: Pandemic Legacy: Season 0 wraps a stylish board game series

cardboard.arstechnica.com . When Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 was released in 2015, it was met with a rave reaction from players. A campaign-based take on the original , it dropped fans into the familiar role of medics battling to eradicate deadly viral strains before they spread around the globe and destroy humanity. Pandemic The game’s biggest draw was a storyline which unfolded over multiple play sessions, with diseases mutating and cities falling into chaos as a sinister conspiracy spread its tendrils across the world. Along the way, players put stickers on the board, destroyed cards, and opened sealed compartments to reveal hidden components, permanently changing the game in response to their own actions. A sequel, Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 , took the action decades into the future, exploring a world wracked by the events of the first game. Now, there’s a third and final installment, taking players back to the dangerous days of 1962 and the height of simmering tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Pandemic Legacy: Season 0 revolves around CIA agents tasked with uncovering plans for a powerful new bio-weapon being developed by rogue elements of the Soviet intelligence services. Where the established Pandemic formula saw players zipping from city to city to get rid of plastic cubes representing diseases, here you and your companions aim to clear the board of miniature plastic spies. Let them spread too freely, and they’ll overthrow the capitalist system. More importantly, they will hand you an embarrassing loss. It’s mostly a superficial change, but it’s far from the only way that Season 0 evokes its Cold War atmosphere. Different locations on its board come with different alignments: Allied, Soviet, and neutral. As enemy agents, you won’t be able to fly freely into Soviet territory, and getting around these restrictions requires setting up teams of local agents, represented by plastic miniatures that look like VW vans. You’ll be able to dispatch them to do your dirty work, assassinating Soviet spooks with ruthless efficiency. Your objectives for each playthrough also feel suitably CIA-esque. You’ll need to find the locations of enemy assets and infiltrate secret Soviet facilities. Best of all, though, are the high-stakes manhunt missions which see a target such as a defector or double agent start in one city and frantically make their way towards Soviet strongholds while you try to cut off all of their possible escape routes. It makes for a thrilling chase with some genuinely gut-wrenching moments where your quarry slips through your fingers just as you close in to grab them.

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