Yes, I'm reviewing a board game.

My cousin gave us this for Christmas and it was a hit. Matt Leacock began designing it in 2004 after realising that his wife wasn't enjoying lots of competitive games. It's co-operative. Either everyone wins, or everyone loses. Diseases are rampaging worldwide and you must save mankind! Every turn, the four diseases keep spreading across the board and you'll get four actions to fight them (treat infected cities, go somewhere, invent a cure, etc.) It's nifty. You can also adjust the difficulty to suit your playing group by deciding how many Epidemic (bad) or Event (good) cards to include before you start.

Today, it feels very COVID-dy, but it was based on the 2002-04 SARS outbreak. As always with successful games, there have been lots of variants and expansion sets. It's nice to have one or two of these, if only for a greater choice of starting roles. Going through the ones I know about:

ON THE BRINK (2009) = the first official expansion. My favourite things here are the Virulent Strain (a fifth disease) and the blank cards for creating your own rules. I made evil Event cards (Lockdown Parties and Football Match, both things that happened in the UK during COVID) and a role called Psychic (whenever drawing cards of any kind, take an extra one and put back one of your choice for the next person). I didn't bother with the Bio-Terrorist challenge for ages, but it's turned out that Misaki enjoys being a baddie. We don't play that challenge's win-or-lose criteria, though. As soon as someone catches the bio-terrorist player, the bio-terrorist is clapped in an ESCAPE-PROOF jail and the player just takes another role card and becomes one of the heroes again.

My favourite thing in this expansion, though, is the petri dishes! This isn't a rule. They're just plastic dishes with lids... but it's so satisfying when you eradicate a disease to put its cubes in a dish and close the lid.

IN THE LAB (2013) = I bought this because of the additional Virulent Strain cards and cubes. The main feature of this expansion is laboratory rules that reflect the real-life process of curing diseases, according to scientists who talked to the game designers. This makes the process fiddlier with a laboratory board and Gene Sequence cards. I'm sure I'll try it one day, but the children aren't in a hurry.

STATE OF EMERGENCY (2015) = I haven't bought this. It has quarantines, an untreatable superbug, some nasty Emergency Event cards and the hinterlands (a separate board for diseases that spread to humans from animals). It sounds slightly better than In The Lab... but there's enough overlap with Legacy that I'm not sure it's worth buying both that and this.

HOT ZONE SERIES (North America in 2020, Europe in 2021) = streamlined high-speed Pandemic with simpler rules in a smaller box. It's quite clever, but you can't mix-and-match its smaller cards with the parent game. It didn't sell well and was discontinued. It'll fit better in a suitcase, though, and you could take it on holiday.

LOTS OF SPIN-OFFS = e.g. Cthulhu, Star Wars and World of Warcraft. One called Contagion lets you play the diseases and try to wipe out mankind. The Survival series about real historical epidemics sounds particularly good. I'm sure these are all fine, but the big one is...

THE THREE LEGACY GAMES (SEASONS 1, 2, 0) = often rated among the greatest board games ever. They're one-use campaigns where you play January, February, March and so on in turn, as you go making permanent changes to the board, cards and rulebook. Sealed boxes contain rules stickers, new pieces, etc. Characters gain experience, skills and scars, or even die. Each "season" has a story arc (like TV) and be warned if discussing them online that fans take spoilers seriously. If you lose in any given month, you're allowed another go in the second half of the month with slightly more generous cards.

The biggest "what the hell" about Legacy is its once-only nature. After completing a season, you'll have a cool board and lots of game pieces, but you can't unstick those stickers. I didn't like this at first, but don't fight it. Embrace it. Scratch off those scratch cards. Trying to play Legacy in a backwards-compatible way (e.g. writing everything down on separate sheets of paper) is a pain in the neck and doesn't work. You'll never be able to return the game to its original state. That said, though, a used copy of Season 1 is compatible with regular Pandemic and you can mix-and-match their rules, cards and game objectives. (The only post-Legacy tweak we've made is to say that anyone can fly between any kind of station.)

A used copy of Season 2, though, is useless. The best you can do is bin the rules and invent your own... in which case you might as well buy a different game instead. Season 2 has a post-apocalypse setting where you're exploring the world and adding stickers to the board as you learn about legendary lost continents (e.g. Europe), while furthermore game balance assumes you keep losing cities as you find new ones. My house rules for a used copy of Season 2 are mostly just regular Pandemic but with Mad Max punk comedy. Essential supplies might include whips, thumbscrews, leather thongs and purple Mohican hair spray. Game objectives might include "find new modes of transport" (chain gang, donkey, pterodactyl), "broadcast a lost treasure to the world from a satellite tower" (Paddington Bear Goes To The Zoo) and "find someone who knows how to read a book".

Conclusion: don't bother with second-hand copies of any Pandemic Legacy. Bite the bullet and buy it new. It's a fair price. £60-ish for 12-24 games on original run-through, plus whatever you do afterwards with the board and cards.

OTHER HOUSE RULES = we ignore the rule about losing when you run out of Player cards. Misaki and Natsuki are 6 and 11 years old. The game's hard enough already without time pressure, although I understand why that rule's there. It stops games from dribbling out in a comfortable, undramatic fashion. Also, at the beginning, we draw three random roles and choose one. (We do the same with games like Talisman too.)

BEST ROLES = Containment Specialist and Medic, for the all-important job of cube removal. Dispatcher and Operations Expert improve the movement of the team. (We thought Dispatcher was boring when we first played it, but it's hard to beat the "foot of Jesus" combination of Dispatcher and Medic in the same game.) Archivist is more useful than it looks. Researcher and Local Liason are good for collecting matching card sets, which is after all how you win the game. Generalist is a great beginner option, letting even a six-year-old play well. Quarantine Specialist is a life-saver in the toughest "6 epidemic cards" mode.

Just one last note. Zombies.