Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 rules refresher

Read the refresher

You win a game by completing the objectives for the current month. The number of objectives required is printed on the board under that month, and any objective marked mandatory must be done. You do that together, as a team, by moving around the world treating disease cubes and collecting matching City cards to discover cures, while outbreaks and panic make the board steadily worse.

Setup starts with the mission briefing. When you are playing a month for the first time, draw and read cards off the top of the Legacy Deck until you hit one that says STOP, read the mission briefing, and add any new cards to the game. If you are replaying the same month, your mission briefing and objectives are the same as before. Place a research station in every city with a starting research station sticker. Outbreaks marker on zero, the four cure markers vial side up, objectives in the objectives area. Add Funded Event cards of your choice to the Player Deck equal to your current funding level, shuffle them with the City cards, and deal starting hands: four cards each with two players, three each with three, two each with four. Hands stay faceup all game. Divide the remaining player cards into five roughly equal facedown piles, shuffle one Epidemic into each, and stack them with the smaller piles at the bottom. Infection rate marker on the leftmost two. Shuffle the Infection deck, flip three cards and put three cubes on each city, three more with two cubes, three more with one cube. Everyone picks a character and all pawns start together at one research station. Apply your win bonus if you earned one last month, then draw a pawn blindly to see who goes first.

Play goes clockwise. On your turn you take four actions, then draw two Player cards, then infect cities. Actions are the familiar eight: Drive or Ferry, Direct Flight, Charter Flight, Shuttle Flight, Build a Structure, Treat Disease, Share Knowledge, and Discover a Cure. After your draw, resolve any Epidemics and discard down to seven cards. Then flip Infection cards equal to the current infection rate and your turn ends.

On movement: Drive or Ferry along a white line, Direct Flight by discarding the card of the city you are going to, Charter Flight by discarding the card of the city you are in to go anywhere, and Shuttle Flight between two research stations. Direct and Charter Flights cannot be used into or out of a city that is rioting, collapsing, or fallen.

Build a Structure discards the matching City card to place a structure in your city, and each city holds only one of each type. If none are left in the supply you may move one from anywhere on the board. Treat Disease removes one cube, or all cubes of that color if it is cured. Discover a Cure is five City cards of one color, discarded at any research station, and the station's color does not need to match. Share Knowledge is giving or taking the card that matches the city you are both standing in, and both players must agree. If that pushes someone over seven cards, they discard or play an event immediately.

If the last cube of a cured disease leaves the board, that disease is eradicated. Flip its cure marker, and if this is the first time, name it and write the name in the disease tracking area. Eradicated diseases place no new cubes when their cities are infected.

An Epidemic is the usual three steps: increase the infection rate, draw the bottom Infection card and put three cubes there, then shuffle the Infection discard pile and put it back on top of the deck. You do not draw a replacement card for an Epidemic. Event cards are not actions and may be played at any time, except in between drawing a card and resolving it.

When a city would take a fourth cube of one color, it outbreaks instead. Advance the outbreaks marker, put one cube of that color in every connected city, and resolve chain reactions after, never hitting the same city twice while resolving one Infection card. Then raise the panic level of every city that outbroke. Level one is unstable, no effect. Levels two and three are rioting: no Direct or Charter Flights in or out, and any research station there is destroyed and cannot be rebuilt. Level four, collapsing, costs one card of the city's color to Drive or Ferry in. Level five, fallen, costs a second card of that color, two in total. These effects stack. If the game would end from outbreaks, only raise panic for the first eight, and you choose which cities those are.

Any character standing in a city when it outbreaks takes a scar. If a character has no empty scar slot, or is in a city when it falls to level five, that character is lost. Rip up the card, discard your hand, take the matching Civilian card, and put your pawn in a city with a research station, or Atlanta if there are none, keeping any actions you have left.

You win the moment you have met the required objectives, even mid-turn or mid-outbreak. You lose immediately if the outbreaks marker reaches the last space, if you cannot place the disease cubes actually needed, or if a player cannot draw two Player cards after their actions. Win or lose, the group then chooses two game end upgrades, which may be the same one twice: an unfunded event sticker on a City card with no sticker, a starting research station sticker on a city that has one, an upgrade on a character who played this game, or a positive mutation on a disease you eradicated this game, added in order. If you won, take the win bonus, move to the next month, and cut funding by two. If you lost, funding goes up by two, and you replay the month if this was its first attempt, otherwise you move on. Funding never goes below zero or above ten. Then clear the board and discard all City cards, but never return Legacy cards to the deck.

A turn, played out

You stand in a city with a research station, holding 7 cards: 5 City cards of one color, the card of your current city, and the card of a neighbor along a white line. That neighbor holds 2 cubes of your color, the last 2 on the board, and sits at panic level 2, rioting. Your first action discovers the cure. You discard the 5 matching cards right here, even though this station is a different color, and that disease is now cured. Next you want the neighbor. Direct Flight would spend its card, but the city is rioting, so no flights in or out. You Drive along the white line instead. Your third action treats disease, and because the disease is cured, both cubes come off at once. They were the last ones, so the disease is eradicated. You flip its cure marker, and since this is the first time, the table names it and writes the name in the disease tracking area. Your fourth action drives you back to the station. You draw 2 Player cards, and one is an Epidemic. The infection rate rises. The bottom Infection card is a city of your eradicated color, so no cubes go there. The discard pile is shuffled onto the deck, you draw no replacement, and you hold 3 cards. Then you flip Infection cards equal to the new rate.