Pandemic Legacy 1-01: Oh no

Last week, some friends and I played our first game of Pandemic Legacy. If you're not familiar with the game, Shut Up & Sit Down has a good review. In short, it takes Pandemic, Matt Leacock's genre-defining disease-fighting co-operative game, and combines it with Risk Legacy, Rob Daviau's re-imagining of Risk that added an ongoing campaign, permanent changes to the board and rules between games and Christmas morning excitement to the old classic. What you get is Pandemic campaign, where each game carries over into the next, modifying some things, adding others and making the players' situation better or worse as the case may be. 

I've decided to write up each of our sessions (months, in the game's fiction) as connected short stories. These will have spoilers, so if you're planning on playing the game, I'd recommend not reading after the jump. 

This episode contains spoilers for January.

1-01: Oh no

January 2015 had easily been the worst month of Sandra Oh's life. Worse than September 2006, her first month of medical school, when she had to constantly tell people that Yes, that was her real name and No, she wasn't that Sandra Oh and No, she didn't know McDreamy or McSteamy. Worse than March 2009, when she had to study for finals and deal with her parents' divorce and recover from a nephrectomy all at once. Worse, even, that February 1992, when Eric Milligan read her Valentine in front of their entire Grade Six class and all the kids called her “Oh Sandra!” for weeks.

January 2015 was worse than all those months combined. Because January 2015 is when the world started falling apart.

It started with outbreaks of a new disease in Asia. All of a sudden, millions of people in Tokyo and Ho Chi Minh city were being infected and nobody knew what to do. Before the Centre for Disease Control could react, New York had a completely different, but equally dangerous epidemic. Soon, reports were coming in from Tehran, Moscow and Bogota of other infections. An invading army of bacteria and viruses had seemingly been hoarding outside of humanities range of vision for years. Now they were storming the beaches. Caught by surprise, humanity's defences had crumbled without a fight.

Somebody needed to pick up the pieces and rebuild the team. Sandra Oh was on that team.

The group was supposed to be the best of the best, but that may have just been PR from a strained CDC. Calling shots at headquarters was Neptune B. Praysed – the strange name a result of having flower children for parents and growing up in a commune. Given how much grief she'd been given for her own name, Sandra felt a lot of sympathy for Neptune. It helped that he was excellent at efficiently dispatching the team to the parts of the world that most needed help. Focusing on discovering cures for the new diseases was Dr. Prestina Gladstone, the top bio-medical researcher of her generation. Sandra had read some of Dr. Gladstone's work during her degree, leaving her a bit starstruck at their first meeting. Gladstone's haughtiness didn't help, but her work spoke for itself. Osmosis Jones (that must be a nickname, right?) was their field medic, moving from city to city to help anybody and everybody he could. Then there was Sandra, unsure of why she was here. She had always been a jack-of-all-trades type and felt out of place in this group of experts and geniuses. But the world needed help and she was willing to give it.

Things moved fast. Before anybody could blink, the infections in Tokyo moved into China and the Philippines. Soon, Tokyo was rioting. Getting in and out of the city became cumbersome. The team quickly establish operating bases in Istanbul and Ho Chi Minh City to ease co-ordination, but still every day they danced on the head of needle, hoping they didn't fall off. Osmosis rushed to Asia to help the sick and dying, while Dr. Gladstone and Neptune looked as many steps ahead as they could afford in order to solve the crisis. Sandra did what she was asked, went where she was needed and prayed to whoever would listen.

Then something really bad – apparently, none of this qualified as “really bad” - happened. Treatments in Asia were becoming less effective. Every patient took longer and longer to help, while the disease spread further and further. Dr. Gladstone had discovered a problem – the disease had mutated. She wouldn't be able to cure it, at least not in this situation, not now. Sandra wanted to panic. She wanted to give up. Instead, she went to work. While Osmosis kept Asia from reaching a critical mass of infection, she shuttled mouth swabs, urine samples and skin grafts back to headquarters. Working day and night, the team was able to find successful treatments for the other three diseases attacking the world.

For a moment, things were looking up. Asia might be an intractable problem, but at least for now there were places on Earth not burning. And Osmosis had developed connections with local governments that would let him do his job there more effectively. The CDC offices in Istanbul had solidified their infrastructure, expanding the team's worldwide reach. January had been terrible, but Sandra let herself hope. Maybe February wouldn't be so bad.

“Bad news,” Neptune said to the team in their meeting room. They had all come back to Atlanta, seeing everyone face-to-face for the first time in a month. “Just got a call from upstairs. Turns out we've done such a great job that our funding's getting cut. Because of some politicians have inflated egos and tight pockets, we have to do twice as much work with have as much money.

Damn. So much for February. Seemed that Sandra's list of “Worst Months Ever” was going to get rearranged a lot this year.