Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 has been officially announced – learn what’s new for the sequel

After what feels like an eternity of rumours, hints and teases about the second season of Pandemic Legacy, publisher Z-Man has finally taken the wraps off this year’s hotly-anticipated sequel to Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau’s groundbreaking legacy game. Or should that be scratched off?

As previously revealed, Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 takes place 71 years after the first game, with the world devastated by a deadly plague. In other words, tough luck: humanity lost after the game’s first season, even if your group won.

If you’ve not played Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, don’t worry – you don’t need to have played it or even heard of Pandemic to jump straight into Season 2. (Though, you should probably play it – it really is a cracking game.)

As in Season 1, a gang of up to four survivors will be trotting around the globe, attempting to survive the disease-ridden world it’s become. Only, the world looks a little different seven decades on: much of humanity has taken shelter on platforms known as ‘havens’, floating out in the ocean away from the deadly mainland. This means, as your group set out in search of supplies, you’ll have to travel mainly by sea between ports, or by foot on land – there’s no air travel at the end of the world.

This is core to perhaps the biggest change in Season 2: the scratch-off game board, which will be slowly revealed as players explore the mysterious map. A few cities will be visible from the off, but players will have to make their way through the unknown dangers to discover what remains of the Earth.

The core disease-curing gameplay of Pandemic that sat at the core of Season 1 has also been changed in the light of the plague’s unstoppable spread. Instead of curing disease, players can only add supply cubes to try and fend off the infection, and must choose which cities they send their support to each round. Working like quarantine tokens in previous Pandemic games, the cubes stop disease cubes being placed, but are spent each time that city’s card is drawn – so they’ll need topping up to survive. Infected cities pose an extra risk to players, with the chance of contracting nasty effects.

Once again, Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 will take place over the course of one year – though it’s not been confirmed that it will follow the same two possible games-per-month structure of the original. As you’d expect from the legacy sequel, actions and decisions in games will have lasting consequences in future matches, with cities and characters able to suffer permanent effects. There’ll also be more secret packages to open, which is always exciting.

Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 is still yet to get an exact release date, but it remains planned for launch this autumn. We can’t wait.