Pandemic Legacy: Learning to Govern
What a Board Game Can Teach Us About Leadership
For those who read French, you can find the the original article here.
In many ways, board games can be understood as loops.
There is, first of all, what game designers call the gameplay loop: the sequence of actions that players repeat from the beginning of the game until its resolution. It forms the mechanical heart of the experience and can itself exist within larger loops. A turn belongs to a round, a round belongs to a game, and a game belongs to the broader ritual that stretches from opening the box to packing everything away again.
From the outward flow of components to their eventual return, the board game traditionally describes a circle. It begins in one state and ends in precisely the same one: the beast goes back into its cardboard cage.
With the arrival of legacy games, however, another geometric figure emerged: the arrow.
The game can now end in a different state from the one in which it began. While the familiar gameplay loops remain intact, something else progresses. The experience leaves a trace.
Traditionally, board games operate according to the logic of the reset. Every completed session is followed by a ritual return to the original state. Components are sorted, decks are rebuilt, tokens are redistributed. The game becomes ready to be played again, exactly as before.
Legacy games challenge this fundamental assumption. There is no going back.
First explored with Risk Legacy in 2011, the format gained widespread recognition with the success of Pandemic Legacy (2015), which has since expanded into a trilogy. In their most radical form, legacy games permanently transform their own material as players progress through the campaign. Cards are torn up. Stickers are applied to boards and rulebooks. Players write directly onto components.
These alterations are often the consequences of decisions made during play or of events triggered by the game’s evolving narrative.
In doing so, legacy systems invite players to question some of board gaming’s most deeply held assumptions: the idea that exploration should be free of consequences, or that replayability is the ultimate measure of value (Daviau, 2017).
Like a bowling ball crashing through a line of pins, legacy games disrupted the way we think about board games.
Episodic Play
Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 (2017), which concerns us here, is a game that demands time.
At a minimum, players will complete thirteen sessions — assuming they succeed on their first attempt each month — with each game lasting roughly forty-five to sixty minutes. The components may remain set up between sessions, quietly occupying part of the household landscape rather than disappearing back into the box.
Over time, the game becomes an anticipated appointment. It creates a form of companionship that bears a striking resemblance to watching a television series.
More specifically: a suspenseful espionage thriller.
All the genre’s familiar ingredients are present. The relentless pacing. The constant pressure. The dramatic reversals. Even the names of the laboratories encountered throughout the campaign — OPAL, JADE, PEARL, TOPAZ — sound like intelligence agency code names.
The supplies and cures pursued by the players function as Hitchcockian MacGuffins: narrative pretexts that propel the plot forward while their precise nature remains largely irrelevant. Like secret documents, bomb codes, or lists of undercover agents, their importance lies not in what they are, but in what they motivate.
The players’ actions themselves reproduce the classic gestures of the spy genre. They race from city to city. They exchange crucial information at the last possible moment. They uncover previously hidden aspects of the world. They gain access to fragments of vital knowledge.
Where traditional board games present themselves in their entirety from the outset — rules, components, possibilities all immediately available — Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 cultivates a sustained sense of discovery by withholding much of its content until specific moments in the campaign.
This “lock and gate” mechanic (Elias & Egelston, 2019) contributes to the gradual process of understanding so characteristic of espionage fiction.
Spy stories often begin by plunging both protagonists and audiences into confusion and uncertainty.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 follows the same logic.
Players encounter fragmented histories, an incomplete map of the world, and mysterious rulebooks containing conspicuous gaps. Gradually, however, the pieces begin to align. The puzzle takes shape. Meaning emerges.
The transformation of the game’s material becomes, in turn, a witness to the passage of time within the fiction itself.
As Rob Daviau himself has explained, the campaign was structured from the outset around the three-act framework of classical storytelling (Daviau, 2017). The narrative was then fragmented and distributed across a succession of cards, gradually revealed and assembled into a coherent whole as players progressed through the game.
The design also makes extensive use of what screenwriters sometimes call “milking”: the art of stretching limited narrative material across a longer duration. With relatively few major events, the game nevertheless manages to sustain an entire season’s worth of suspense.
As is often the case in board games, this authored content intertwines with the players’ own secondary narratives. From one session to the next, stories emerge organically around the table: the spectacular mistake that almost doomed humanity, the impossible comeback, the heated argument over priorities, the triumphant final turn.
In the end, these are often the moments that matter most.
The game remains episodic to the very end. New regions of the world are gradually added to the board. New objectives emerge. Additional effects and constraints reshape familiar situations. The campaign continually engineers its own cliffhangers, creating the irresistible desire to discover what happens next — or simply to play one more session.
The sensation of progression is first and foremost visual.
The spaces marking completed months are crossed out. Torn cards accumulate beside the board. Secret compartments are opened one by one.
Combined with the game’s temporal structure, these hidden boxes evoke something very close to an Advent calendar, recreating the same mixture of anticipation and impatience. Each revelation becomes a small ritual of discovery.
Much like binge-watching a television series, players quickly develop a compulsive desire to know how the story ends — alongside an equally powerful determination to save the world.
These parallels with serialized storytelling reveal the permeability of games within the broader cultural ecosystem that surrounds them (see, on this subject, our article on Unmatched). Play constantly evolves by borrowing forms, rhythms, and devices from other narrative media.
In this sense, the ways we play — our postures, our pacing, our rituals — may represent only a small part of a much larger continent that remains to be explored.
A Clever Illusion
Take a pattern, repeat it, and you have the beginnings of a game.
Repetition has always been one of the driving forces of play — perhaps even its founding principle. Most games invite us to revisit the same structures over and over again.
In Pandemic Legacy: Season 2, players spend much of their time making and unmaking. They prepare decks, distribute infection cubes, organise components, and then carefully restore everything at the end of each session.
This resembles Penelope’s endless weaving and unweaving: a perpetual labour undertaken in the hope of holding disaster at bay.
The repetition evokes many of our own daily struggles — feeding ourselves, preserving peace, maintaining self-control — endeavours whose success depends less on grand gestures than on patient consistency.
And yet, from the outside, the game appears to evolve dramatically from one session to the next.
The board transforms. The map expands. Cards are destroyed. Rules seem to change constantly. By the end of the campaign, the game feels almost unrecognisable.
Plot twist: its underlying mechanics have barely changed at all.
This is where the brilliance of Pandemic Legacy: Season 2’s design truly lies: its ability to create the illusion of radical transformation.
Part of the confusion stems from the inherently slippery nature of what we call a game mechanic.
Although designers have produced countless lists, taxonomies, and encyclopaedias of mechanics, these remain merely particular ways of describing systems. Mechanics are indispensable tools for designing games — and, indeed, for marketing them — but they become much more porous when subjected to analytical scrutiny.
Determining where one mechanic ends and another begins is ultimately a matter of perspective. A cluster of actions that one observer identifies as a distinct mechanic may, for another, dissolve into more fundamental axioms or become absorbed within a broader system.
As a result, different players may perceive the same game through entirely different mechanical lenses.
The mechanics of Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 are, in fact, relatively easy to identify and remain remarkably stable throughout the campaign: action points, hand management, cooperation, pick-up-and-delivery, and so on (the BoardGameGeek taxonomy provides a useful overview).
What truly evolves are not the mechanics themselves, but what we might call their modifiers.
Consider a simple example.
The base rules state that players may only give a city card to another player if they occupy the same city and if the card being transferred corresponds to that location.
Later in the campaign, a new rule appears:
players may now exchange any city card while occupying a particular type of location, regardless of where the recipient is, provided the card shares the colour of the city they currently inhabit.
The mechanic — giving a card to another player — remains intact. Only the conditions governing its application have changed. This is where the designers demonstrate remarkable ingenuity.
They make an evolving format possible through a system of communicating vessels. As players acquire favourable modifiers that expand their capabilities, the game simultaneously introduces new constraints that increase the overall challenge.
Occasionally, genuinely new actions emerge. Players may, for example, construct shelters, protecting characters from infection under certain circumstances. Yet even these additions are largely variations built upon existing foundations.
The same principle applies to the campaign’s countless evolving rules governing cards, movement, buildings, populations, and resources.
The engine itself never changes. Only the scenery surrounding it does.
The Accounting of the Post-Apocalyptic World
Board games offer no shortage of opportunities to save the world. The real challenge lies in deciding by what means, through which mechanics and narrative devices, players might actually experience the emotions attached to such a responsibility.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 immerses players in a retro-post-apocalyptic world. Humanity has fled a devastating plague and taken refuge in offshore havens — isolated islands cut off from the rest of the world.
As in any society turned inward upon itself, the Other becomes an abstraction.
The enemy becomes a concept.
Players must contend with the threat posed by the Hollow Men, as the game calls these faceless bands of raiders who spread the disease. Their presence is diffuse and invisible. Significantly, the original English term — Hollow Men — evokes emptiness more than monstrosity, referring less to zombies than to figures deprived of substance.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 tells us something about the way self-sufficiency distances us from embodied forms of antagonism and encourages a binary vision of the world, one in which Good and Evil remain clearly identifiable.
Although the action takes place on Earth and invites players to reconnect real cities — Paris, New York, Kinshasa, and others — the overall movement of the game is toward a higher level of abstraction.
The cities on the board possess neither countries nor cultures.
They are defined only through factual and utilitarian characteristics: whether they contain a port (allowing “teleportation” to another port through a special action), the number of connections they maintain with neighbouring cities (are they hubs or dead ends?), and the size of their population, represented by a value that fluctuates throughout the campaign and determines their capacity to withstand future waves of infection.
Players are thus confronted with a schematic world reduced to numbers.
It is here that Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 reveals a form of relentless — and yet remarkably lucid — cynicism: crisis management causes human beings to disappear behind figures, replacing lived experience with an accounting view of reality.
The various story cards gradually revealed throughout the campaign struggle to restore flesh and complexity to these computational mechanics.
The player characters suffer a similar fate.
At the beginning of the game, we assign them names, ages, and portraits.
Very quickly, however, they become reduced to their function. They are little more than cogs within a larger machine, distinguished only by the powers and special abilities they contribute to the group.
They are scarcely more than archetypes: the Scientist, the Biologist, the Soldier.
The game therefore allows us to experience governance itself: a simulation of decision-making at the highest level, in which individuals become variables. A number in a spreadsheet.
The Torn Veil
Not all legacy games require players to literally destroy their components. In fact, this remains relatively uncommon: only around a third of legacy games make use of such spectacular forms of irreversibility (Xiang, 2020). Yet conferences and articles devoted to the topic tend to repeat the same refrain: “It’s traumatic for gamers.”
This visceral discomfort surrounding the destruction of game components is, in itself, rather surprising. We spend our days destroying and discarding things — packaging, disposable products, and, the more cynical among us might add, lives. Other games, such as crossword puzzles or Sudoku books, exist precisely through their one-time use.
And yet, because we are dealing with a “proper” board game — an object we have purchased, collected, and grown attached to — the very same destructive gesture suddenly takes on a different meaning. The joy of destruction is, however, one of childhood’s great motifs. What happened in the meantime?
Legacy games reveal the profound attachment to material possessions that characterises Western societies. The sociology of legacy players — a niche within the niche of modern board gaming — would probably reveal a population particularly attached to material comfort. Legacy games are expensive and, despite their mainstream success, still retain something of the avant-garde. They might not the games one casually brings out after Sunday lunch with the family.
The anxiety provoked by destruction therefore belongs to a very particular social group, caught between its affection for play and the luxuries afforded by consumer society. To destroy the object that brings us joy is to threaten our ideal way of life. It is to tear apart the magical veil surrounding games — a world in which going backwards is always possible. Suddenly, my actions have real consequences.
I become responsible for my choices. And I must live with them.
This is where destructive legacy games mark a fascinating turning point in the history of board games. The formula was nevertheless quickly absorbed and softened by the market. New forms of non-destructive legacy games emerged: “evolving” games capable of being reset. Players were reassured: the breach had closed. The components had been saved. The world had returned to its normal state, that is to say: infinitely replayable.
To be continued.
P.S. If you’ve made it this far, tear up your computer and go outside.
