by Corvin331
StandSure wrote:
Thanks Avi for writing this. My wife and I just lost our 3rd game in a row (beginning of May), and we are really struggling with wanting to play more. We both loved PL1 and actually did very well with it, but PL2 has from the start seemed like much more of a slog and it's been hard to feel engaged in the story because of it.
The wife and I just finished March/April with a L/W/L/L record. It kinda sucks so I hopped on here to see what the consensus was.
We've played hundreds of games of vanilla and then Season 1. We've won plenty and lost plenty. The magic of Pandemic has always been that even in a loss, you can trace back your steps and realize that doing that "one thing" differently could have changed the outcome. That doesn't seem to be the case in PL2. We feel like we are completely at the mercy of the game, almost like it's wanting us to lose. In the original game it never feels like the deck outright screws you like this game. You aren't dependent on waiting for that one card to show up like in PL2. There's no "well if we did this differently we could have won" feeling. When you lose the game you get decimated. As someone metioned above, we've had plenty of games come down to the absolute last turn of the game/end of the player deck. So you setup and play again because you were so close you could taste it. You know what you did wrong. i.e. you don't mind losing. Losing in PL2 by the 2nd or 3rd Epidemic is a joke. There is no "we could have done this differently" feeling, just "we were just screwed from the get-go."
I think the problem is this game might just be too difficult for 2-players(at least early on). There's just too much to do for two people AND protect cities/provide supplies.
Oh well, we'll forge on and see how it goes. We like the mechanics, but it just feels like the game is wanting us to lose. lol