Pandemic Legacy: March
Given how last month ended, we knew we were expecting a loss in March. We needed to complete two of the three objectives:
Cure 3 diseases
Eradicate 1 disease
Set up military bases in each of 6 regions.
Military stations were introduced, but we didn't feel as though their usefulness has been realized. We had good progress with curing diseases, but we simply had too much Tikka MaSARS outbreaks with no one staying in the area to quarantine. Our team made it out of the area unscathed, but our Tehran research station burned to the ground.
We did not succeed in curing the world, taking our first loss of the Legacy. As our end of game modifiers, we made red even easier to cure, and gave ourselves a new permanent research station in southern east Asia. Our difficulties early in this month were using our team to the best of their abilities, and planning beyond the current move.
Legacy offers two chances to win each month. If you win on your first attempt, you proceed to the next month. Otherwise, you play that month again. In some ways it's nice to have the opportunity to start over, but anything that happened last game is still on the board, so we also had the feeling we could just be making things worse.
LATE MARCH
We agreed to use the same team members for our second attempt. The pressure was on, and we had many heated debates about which areas to save and which areas to sacrifice. The Middle East continued to be a hotbed of activity.
We tried to forecast beyond one turn at a time, to create a comprehensive strategy instead of a reflexive one. We intended to establish an infrastructure of research stations for easy travel, but an early epidemic card created premature outbreaks.
Though many areas became unstable, we were able to cure Asia and eradicate diseases in North America, with South America quickly following. We took this game down to the wire, with only three cards to spare, the Middle East on the brink, and our outbreaks at dangerous heights.
We chose to give Penny the Flexible attribute, which allows her to discard a card and draw a card of the same color from the player discard pile. We paired this with The Grassroots Program unfunded event, adding this to the Middle Eastern city of Chennai.
This allows the person to play the card to discard up to 3 city cards and remove 1 cube matching the color of each card from anywhere on the board. Our win takes funded events out of our deck again, so this is our attempt to give Middle Eastern cards a little more purpose and try to control what we can't cure.