(SPOILER ALERT - this article will contain spoilers of Legacy games).
When Legacy games
burst onto the scene in 2011-12 with Risk: Legacy, the gaming world felt a
seismic shift. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, legacy games are
designed to be permanently changed through a series of sessions by the game
play itself. Often this involves the removal or tearing up of cards, the
ability to name character cards and make permanent positive or negative changes
to them. Sometimes you'll go as far as changing the playing board, often through the use of stickers and
writing on it, but it always involves changes to the rules which are revealed
through each playing session.
Risk and Pandemic
(Season 1 and 2) have all of these elements. Like many others, my family played
Risk from the earliest age (pretty sure I was 8 when I first played), and it’s
the stated reason why a lot of those families and a lot of people in my family
say that they don’t like boardgames. Who doesn’t remember the hours and hours
and HOURS stuck round a table rolling dice while someone insists on slowly
crushing another player, while said “little guy” refuses to give up, taking
their two extra units for holding Australia and getting unbelievably lucky with
the dice (yes amazingly my parents are still married). But the Risk franchise
has moved on, improving on the basic idea with each new iteration, unlike so
many other games which just reskin it to a theme (Cluedo I’m looking at you).
With Risk: Legacy they’ve massively improved game length by including Red Stars
as the means by which you win. No longer do you win by controlling the majority
of the board but by multiple means of collecting said Stars. Notably capital
cities count as stars which makes the game feel a little more realistic to war.
There are other fun elements, such as the fallout events once you drop a
nuclear bomb making certain areas no-go zones unless you’re a particular
faction. This is Legacy at its inception and clearest. You change and grow and
develop through each game, discovering new rules and tantalizingly sometimes
missing out on opening boxes. Your board, armies and game will be permanently
changed and importantly your board will look nothing like mine. The beauty of
Legacy is it gives you a totally unique gameplay experience compared to other
people who have played exactly the same game.
Similarly,
Pandemic Legacy Season 1 and 2 takes the original idea of Pandemic and shifts
it. In Season 1 you begin by playing a fairly normal game of Pandemic, however
the difficulty is quickly intensified as decisions you make from game to game
carry over. If a city falls to the disease in one game, it is permanently affected
in the next. Situations can quickly escalate and you don’t know what the rules
changes from one game to the next will be. You might think, OK I’ll Quarantine
North America and try to block it off, then the next game it reveals that only
certain characters can enter quarantine zones which now are more difficult to
control. Just as an aside, Pandemic Legacy Season 1 is one of the best games on
the market period. Season 2 isn’t quite as good though it is full of Legacy goodness.
You start with a half empty board as communication has been lost around the
world. Throughout the game large stickers are revealed to fill in the missing
areas which you have to draw lines on the board to connect to cities to gain
access to. Unlike Season 1, it feels a little more like the game story is on
tracks. If you mess up and miss an important box, well OK open that box now
because you need it. As another aside personally I was also a little miffed
that we got the highest score level on Season 1, congratulating us on having
forever saved the world; in Season 2 everything has gone to pot and all our
heroic efforts were for nothing as the world sinks into chaos …. Hey I turn my
back for one minute and have to save you lot again! What happened to eternal
glory!?!
Moving on I would
argue that Charterstone is possibly a Legacy game but with a little “l”. Now I
know there are mega fans of Jamey Stegmaier who this may annoy, and I respect
that, Jamey is a towering presence in the industry and a thoroughly nice guy.
However, I happen not to like worker placement games, so I really didn’t like
Charterstone. At its worst I found it boring. At its best I found it disappointing
because I couldn’t get my series of villages to kick properly. Again, as with
all legacy games, it had revealed rules, stickers which covered each other up,
characters which you name and change over time. But it also holds your hand and
leads you through the game, opening most (to be fair not all) of the boxes and
leading you through a story. There’s no way that I can not open boxes, the King
is coming and he will pick your village to be the Eternal City and no amount of
deliberately pissing him off or not trusting the clearly malevolent old codger
will stop that.
Machi Koro Legacy
again is a very different beast. I would suggest that if it is a Legacy game is
with a tiny little whispered “legacy” if at all. It’s a fantastic gateway game
to introduce more casual gamers to the concept of Legacy, which can distress
and unnerve players with the seeming destruction of your often frankly very
expensive game. Machi Koro includes the standard elements of reveled rules
which change with each game, added cards and game elements and stickers, but
that’s it. Unlike Risk and Pandemic where the stickers are integral to the
continued playing of the game, where you may not get through all of the
elements or be able to open all of the boxes, in Machi Koro the stickers are
just decorative and you get to open, see and experience everything. Don’t get
me wrong, I love it, it’s got totally adorable minis which fill an actual
gameplay need (though a counter would do), it solves a couple of tactical
problems I’ve always had with Machi Koro, and is Kawaii in all its glory while
still very much being Machi Koro. It’s just not particularly LEGACY.
Which brings me to
maybe my main point. I like a Legacy game which I feel in control of, one where
I know my board and game play experience might be vastly different from yours.
Your Risk or Pandemic board won’t look anything like mine; you won’t understand
why Ho Chi Minh City as the epicenter of our fallen world now makes us shout
“Not Ho Chi Minh City!” if its ever mentioned in real life, or that Iceland is
a baren wasteland populated only by nuclear zombies. But I’m pretty certain my
version of Charterstone and yours will look pretty similar, and our gameplay
experience will be almost identical (with Machi Koro this isn’t even a question,
our copy will look like your copy).
There are a lot of
games which have legacy elements. Ravens of Thri Sahashri has you open new
rules through each new game; Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective has
expandable content, with the newspapers being used from game to game, and can
only really be played through once; but I wouldn’t say that they’re Legacy
games. In the nearly 10 years that Legacy has been a thing the term seems to be
getting a little stretched and overused. I would argue that a Legacy game has
to have a board that is permanently and dramatically changed for important game
play reasons, have player cards which can be improved or negatively affected
from game to game, and have revelatory rules. Maybe there will be more games
like Risk: Legacy in the future, but if the definition keeps getting broader
and broader, I sadly don’t think so.
We were not paid for this review
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