Prologue

So, here's the thing with Pandemic. If you've played it before, you think you know what you need to do. Focus on the objectives, put fires out where you need to, but don't get distracted.

In base Pandemic, this means that if you can, eradicate things, but mainly just prevent outbreaks and focus on finding cures. You can waste a lot of time trying to wipe a disease out, and you can't get that time back when you realise that you're a few actions short of finding the last cure.

So when we opened Season 0, we thought we knew what we needed to do: keep the cities with three agents from spilling over, and focus on the targets.

In the first prologue, you're looking for an agent who's gone MIA, as well as some research on this mysterious MEDUSA virus.

Season 0 introduces an Acquire Targets action, where your teams in one or more cities can try to complete an objective. Sometimes, you know where the cities are - you just get told. Other times, you need to Identify the target city - this costs 3 region cards.

We knew we'd need at least one Soviet team, so that was our focus in the first game. While we were collecting the resources for that first team, we wandered around the map stamping out fires as we went. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake, since teams turn out to be pretty powerful. They only act once a turn, but they act every turn, and remove all agents in a city if the team is active (i.e. the team matches the affiliation).

Combined with the Medical Conference Coordinator role (move a team or another player up to 3 cities away as an action), this means that teams can be quite mobile, and save a lot of time. Plus, you need them to complete Acquire Targets objectives.

If you don't know where the target city is, you have a few options: draw out the player deck and eliminate all the other possibilities (each city has only one player card); use the Identify Target City (costing 3 region city cards) to shortcut this and find out, or; you can just guess.

Why would you guess? If you're about to run out of player deck, and people aren't in the right places to produce more teams; if you already have most of the potential cities ruled out and the rest already have teams on them, or; maybe you just want to throw caution to the win and chance it?

We didn't end up guessing any cities, though. The problem? We ended up losing the first time due to a cascade of incidents. These are different and perhaps more difficult to deal with than outbreaks.

With outbreaks, you could keep a lid on things just by looking out for clusters, and making sure you kept them down. Incidents are a bit more random - they could cause you to lose a safehouse in a region, or add agents wherever there's been an incident before.

They start off pretty innocuous - it's entirely possible that, losing cover and the incident itself notwithstanding, you won't suffer any adverse effects from your first, and perhaps second, incident. But once you've got a few spread out, across the board... that's where things get tricky. Suddenly, extra agents in Asia become an issue.

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We learnt pretty quickly from our mistakes in the first playthrough, and won handily in the second attempt. What we focused on:

• gathering cards, as usual
• building a team when we had the chance - there were disagreements on the utility of them, but I think that having something that would control agents, even if it was just sitting on the same city (though, of course, we moved them around), paid off in the long run
• really really focusing on preventing incidents, though that was still closer than expected

A good hack: if you have an Allied City Card, you can get to any location on the map in two actions (Commercial Flight there, Unrecorded Flight out).

Not much more to say on the Prologue. Next up, January!