• Pandemic Legacy Season 1 (Red Edition)

Z-Man Games

Pandemic Legacy Season 1 (Red Edition)

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Pandemic Legacy Season 1 (Red Edition) is a cooperative legacy campaign for 2–4 players aged 13 and up, with sessions of about 60 minutes at a medium complexity. Across a year-long story, your team battles deadly diseases while every choice permanently reshapes the board, cards and rules.

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About the Game

Your team of disease-fighting specialists must hold back deadly outbreaks across an entire in-game year — but every decision leaves a permanent mark. Cities fall, characters change, stickers transform the board, and sealed compartments reveal new rules and twists as the story unfolds. No two campaigns of Pandemic Legacy Season 1 play out the same way.

Designed for 2–4 players aged 13 and up, each session runs about 60 minutes at a medium complexity, blending cooperative play with hand management, set collection and point-to-point movement.

Released by Z-Man Games in 2015, this Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock design reimagines the classic Pandemic as an evolving legacy campaign, earning acclaim as a leap forward in modern board game design. Unlike the standalone original, actions carry lasting consequences across roughly 12–24 linked sessions. The Red Edition shares its contents with the Blue Edition, differing only in box colour.

History

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 was released by Z-Man Games in 2015 and designed by Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock. It applied the legacy format Daviau had introduced in Risk Legacy (2011) — in which a game changes permanently over a series of sessions — to the cooperative world of Pandemic.

The game was released to positive reviews and praised as a leap forward in modern board game design. The Red Edition is one of two box variants, with contents identical to the Blue Edition.

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Watch: How to play

Rules of Pandemic Legacy Season 1 (Red Edition)

  • Setup: Each player creates a named character and takes a role, pawns start in Atlanta, and you place disease cubes, infection and outbreak markers, and deal starting hands. Keep the Legacy deck, dossiers and sealed packages aside until the game tells you to open them.
  • Campaign structure: You play through an in-game year, one session per month with up to two attempts per month, for roughly 12–24 linked games of about 60 minutes.
  • Turn flow: On your turn take up to four actions (move, treat disease, share knowledge, build a research station, or discover a cure), then draw two player cards, then draw infection cards to add cubes to cities.
  • Epidemics: When an Epidemic card appears, the bottom infection card gets three cubes, discards are shuffled back on top, and the infection rate may rise — expect outbreaks to chain if cities reach three cubes.
  • Objectives: Early on you win by discovering all four cures, but the Legacy deck introduces new and changing objectives as the story unfolds — always check your current objective cards.
  • Permanent changes: Follow instructions to apply stickers, mark the board, destroy cards and record scars or panic levels. These changes persist for the rest of the campaign.
  • Game end: You lose a session if the outbreak marker reaches the end, a disease runs out of cubes, or the player deck runs out. Win or lose, you pick upgrades afterwards, and a lost month is usually replayed once before the campaign moves on.

Strategy

  • Prioritise discovering cures over tidying the board — treating every cube is rarely sustainable, so work towards turning in card sets.
  • Keep cities at three cubes under control first; preventing outbreak chains usually matters more than clearing safe cities.
  • Build one or two early research stations to make travel and sharing knowledge much easier across the map.
  • Coordinate as a team: meet in the same city to pass cards, and lean on each role's special ability every turn where you can.
  • Watch the infection discard pile — after an Epidemic those cities come back on top, so plan who will be nearby.
  • Manage the seven-card hand limit; don't hoard cards hoping for a perfect set when a five-card cure is available.
  • Think before making permanent choices like stickers or scars — read the instructions fully, as you cannot undo them later.
  • Don't be discouraged by a lost month; the campaign is designed to continue either way, and the funded event cards and upgrades can help your rematch.