Kids Say:

"This is the first legacy game I’ve been genuinely excited to play every single day. It is cleaner than Pandemic Legacy Season 1; the cities don’t seem to get overcrowded with too many stickers and cubes. I love the plot twists which feel like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I named my spy J. Edgar Copperbottom and disguised him with a fluffy fake moustache."

"I disagree. I found myself easily distracted while we were playing, especially when it wasn’t my turn. My parents told me that I should help them on their turns, but I didn’t want to. The problem isn’t me, the problem is the game."

Adults Say:

"I love everything about this game, from the evolving rules to the horn-rimmed glasses and Beatnik hair decals that you can use to disguise your alias. As soon as I finish playing, I start counting down the hours until I can play again."

"This plays like Pandemic, but it’s cleverly disguised as a Cold War spy game. It’s 1962, and while Istanbul is already Istanbul, many of the other cities we have come to know from the contemporary world map have names that have since been retired… Bombay, Calcutta, Saigon, Peking, and Leningrad. One is reminded of the beloved song lyric, 'So if you’ve a date in Leopoldville, she’ll be waiting in Kinshasa.'”

"As junior CIA operatives, your team soon discovers that the pestilence threatening the planet is not an actual infection, but the infection of Communism. Oh, and now there is an actual viral infection, too, just to complicate things.  If you’re going to stamp out both ideological blight and blight blight, you’re going to need two boots: teamwork and ingenuity. It also doesn’t hurt to have a Gunbrella and be buddies with a crime boss in Kiev."

"This game is the thematic prequel to Pandemic Legacy Season 1, and it is every bit as engrossing. The excitement of the game is only rivaled by the thrills that take place both before and after you actually play, when you unlock new challenges, new abilities, and new roadblocks. This is a legacy game, which means there is an Advent calendar of cardboard windows that you can only open when the time is right, but instead of getting chocolate, you get wiretaps, safe houses, and rogue operatives poisoning the water supply in Johannesburg."

"Two words of caution. First, it might be hard to do well at this game if you haven’t played the heck out of the original Pandemic already. Second, the quality of the pieces is generally wonderful, but there are scratch off cards that don’t work very well. Fortunately, the thing you are scratching off to reveal is always bad, so if the card becomes denatured during the scratching process, the bad things don’t happen."