Pandemic or Pandemic Legacy: which one should you buy?

What is the difference?

Pandemic is a cooperative game: you travel the world, treat diseases and collect cards to cure them before outbreaks or the clock beat you. Every game starts from the same box and ends there too.

Pandemic Legacy keeps that engine and adds a story. Each game is a month. Between games you open sealed boxes, put stickers on the board, write on cards and tear some up. What happened last game is still there next game. The three seasons are three separate campaigns.

Who should buy plain Pandemic instead?

• Changing groups. Legacy needs the same people at every game. Plain Pandemic works with whoever turns up.
• Teachers and families. Plain Pandemic plays in 45 minutes from age 8. Legacy says 13+.
• People who want expansions. On the Brink, In the Lab and State of Emergency are made for the base game. Our ranking of every Pandemic box covers them.
• The forever crowd. A Legacy campaign ends. Pandemic doesn't.

How long is a Legacy campaign, really?

Every Legacy season runs for 12 months. Win a month's game and you move on. Lose it and you play the month once more, then move on whatever happens. So a campaign is 12 games plus one for every month you lose at the first try. That makes the length a simple coin-flip count, which we can work out exactly for any win rate.

Season 1 has a built-in catch-up rule too. After a loss, your next game gets 2 more funded event cards; after a win, 2 fewer. Good groups get squeezed, struggling groups get help, and the campaign tends to stay tense either way. Our coin-flip model ignores that, so if anything real campaigns bunch up a little more around the middle.

Which Legacy season should you play first?

Season 1 first. It stays closest to regular Pandemic, so it teaches the engine while the story builds, and the later seasons are more fun when you know what they are playing with. Season 2 is the boldest. Season 0 is a prequel, which makes it tempting as a starting point, but it is a better third course than first.

Two exceptions. If the outbreak theme puts someone at your table off, start with Season 0: it trades the doctors for spies. And if you have played a lot of regular Pandemic and want a bigger shake-up, Season 2 works fine as a first season. None of the three needs the others.

Should you play regular Pandemic first?

No need. Season 1 begins with almost exactly the regular rules, and it suggests a practice game or two with the same components if you are new. But there is one rule that loses most first games, Legacy or not, and it is worth understanding before you start: the Intensify step of an Epidemic.

When an Epidemic hits, a new city gets 3 cubes. Then the infection discard pile, every city hit since the last Epidemic, is shuffled and put back on top of the infection deck. Including the city that just got 3 cubes. So the next infections are not random cities: they are the ones already sick.

Is Pandemic easier with fewer players?

Yes, and the deck shows why. The team gets about the same number of turns whatever the player count, because the player deck is the clock. What changes is how those turns and cards are spread. A cure needs 5 cards of one color in one hand, and with 2 players each hand sees about twice as many cards as with 4.

Standard difficulty, full-length game: starting hand plus every card you draw, Epidemics included. Two players also see the board change less between their own turns, which makes planning easier. That is why two is the easiest count, and why Legacy, which you will play many times with the same people, is great with two.

The quick answers

Can you replay a Legacy campaign?

Not the story. Stickers stay on, torn cards stay torn. You can still set up a game on your finished board, but the surprises are spent. If you want to play it again with another group, buy another copy.

Red or blue? Yellow or black?

Same game. Season 1 comes in red and blue boxes, Season 2 in yellow and black, and the contents are the same. Pick the color you like on your shelf.

Legacy or an expansion for the Pandemic you own?

Same steady group: Legacy, every time. Changing group, or you want to push the difficulty: On the Brink. Its Legendary setting is the hardest one we measured, see how hard each setting gets.

Is Legacy harder than regular Pandemic?

It starts at about the same level and then goes wherever your results take it. Each game also matters beyond itself: an outbreak today makes a city worse next month. The funding rule keeps it from running away in either direction.

Already own one and wondering what comes next? Our ranking of every Pandemic expansion and version has the expansions, the standalone games and the spin-offs.

How we worked it out

Campaign lengths: each of the 12 months is played once, or twice after a first-try loss. We assumed the same chance of winning every first attempt, which turns the number of replays into a binomial count. The real funding rule makes a win after a loss a little easier and a win after a win a little harder, so real campaign lengths probably spread a bit less than the chart shows.

Deck numbers come from the regular Pandemic rules (2nd edition, 2013), which Season 1 starts from. Every Epidemic sits uniformly at random in its own pile, so we listed every possible layout of the player deck with its exact probability, then followed the infection piles through every turn. A rules engine with tests against the rulebook checks the same numbers by simulation. The Legacy seasons change cards as the campaign goes on, so later months will drift from these numbers. More on how we work.

Standard, 4 players: 25 turns in the deck, 66 infection cards drawn over a full game.