I’ve written two previous articles on Legacy games. The first, on Legacy Play, overviewed the form, its advantages, and its controversy. The second, on Legacy Venn, examined which gaming elements combine to create the Legacy category. What I didn’t talk about in those articles is the specific mechanics that support Legacy play.

There’s a good reason for that: Legacy games are largely black boxes. There are two reasons for that. First, many of the mechanics of a Legacy game are explicitly boxed up in cardstock containers that you only break open as the game proceeds. Second, a strong anti-spoiler culture has arisen around these games, making casual discussion of their Hidden Secrets entirely verboten. As a result, it’s hard to really know what’s in these games, and it’s also hard to talk about them.

Fortunately, I’ve been breaking open black boxes for the last nine months, running two Legacy games out of my house: SeaFall (2016) and Pandemic Legacy: Season Two (2017). I’ve also got a few games of Pandemic Legacy: Season One (2015) under my belt, and I was willing to read the spoilers for Risk Legacy (2011) because I never expect to play it and to at least look at the core rules for Charterstone (2017) and Gloomhaven (2017). All told, I felt like that was enough to at least start a discussion of Legacy mechanics — particularly Legacy mechanics as envisioned by Rob Daviau. There should be no spoilers, just specific statements about how these games look out of the box and vague statements of things that may or may not exist in extant Legacy games.

So what exactly are Legacy mechanics? They’re things that modify the gaming environment. They create a constantly changing and evolving play space and make players feel like they’re developing a game that’s different from anything that anyone else has ever played before.

These mechanics can be divided into several sorts.

Simple Mechanics

Legacy games lie at the overlap of Modifiable Components and Campaign Play. However, the simplest Legacy mechanics don’t actually require that modifiability. Once upon a time, campaign games noted these simple mechanical changes on a scoring sheet or a character sheet. Legacy games have just made these modifications more evocative and more long lasting by supporting the permanent modifications of fancy four-color character sheets (or score sheets) using pens or stickers.

Scoring the Game. The very simplest Legacy mechanic is the maintenance of a cumulative score from one game to the next. However for Legacy play to work in a dynamic play environment, a little more work is usually needed, to figure out what to do when new players show up or when players miss sessions. There should also be some a “rubber banding” mechanic that keeps players from becoming too far separated: many reviews of SeaFall have reported players getting frustrated in later games when they decide they can never catch up.

Changing Characters. After scores, the easy thing to modify in a Legacy game is a character. After all, you can back to before the birth of Legacy games and find changing characters: way back in the ’80s, heroes could use gold to upgrade their weapon and armor between games of HeroQuest (1989). However, Legacy games tend to go further than that:

1. Because Legacy game support a wider variety of types of gameplay, a character could be a faction, a country, or something more abstract.
2. Any of these characters could be changed by improving existing attributes or by giving them new special abilities.
3. The statistics for these characters could be recorded on a sheet that the player controls or on some physical location on the board. For example, SeaFall allows players to players to place new stickers on both their player board and on their country’s board position, while Pandemic Legacy offers a more standard methodology where stickers are just added to character cards.
4. These changes could even be bad, as with the scars in Pandemic Legacy.

Gloomhaven may offer one of the most developed examples of this “simple” mechanic: fulfilling a character’s battle goals and gathering experience points drive the game (especially the less cooperative parts of the game). The game also has layers or character improvement where both the characters and the adventuring party can change.

Bit-Changing Mechanics

Next up from making tally changes that could be recorded on sheets is making more extensive changes to the components of the game: the tokens, the markers, the cards, the dice, and whatever else the game might contain. This walks the edge of what was possible before full-blown Legacy mechanics appeared: Pathfinder Adventure Card Game shows how it’s possible to systematically add and store components (specifically cards) over the extended course of a game, but once you go from component addition to component modification, you’re in full Legacy land.

Adding or Subtracting Cards. It’s easy enough to add or subtract cards from a Legacy game as it proceeds. In fact, the simplicity of this is a prime reason that most Legacy games are card-driven (to various degrees). Card changes can affect just about every other Legacy mechanic, from changing characters (see above) to changing rules (see below). Subtracting a card from a Legacy game by ripping it up is practically a rite of passage — and something that helps ensure that future games are clean and uncluttered.

Adding or Subtracting Tokens or Markers. One of the joys of a Legacy game is picking up a new cardstock box and realizing that there’s something small and heavy in it, which usually means new bits. They might be extra supplies of an existing component, new varieties of an existing component, or totally new components that support new rule systems. As with the changes to cards, changes to tokens or markers can drive any other sort of Legacy mechanic.

Changing the Components. But now we arrive at something that’s not practically possible in non-Legacy games: changing the components as they exist. This has been most commonly seen with cards, because they can be easily stickered: Pandemic Legacy allows the stickering of both its player cards (to make them more powerful) and its epidemic cards (to make them less harmful). Gloomhaven similarly allows player ability cards to be stickered. You could also have scratch-off boxes on cards that introduce a very precise power-up (or which support a one-time ability). Just as with character changes, component changes might not be an improvement. In fact, there’s probably even more opportunity for bad component changes, because they aren’t always associated with specific characters or players.

World-Changing Mechanics

Next up are modifications to the game “world”. Here, you’re really embracing the possibility of Legacy mechanics. That’s because they often modify a very specific and very central component: the game board.

Defining the World. The easiest way to give players a bit of control over their game world is to allow them to name things. These could be locations on a game board (like the Havens in Legacy Season 2 or the islands in SeaFall or the continents in Risk: Legacy), but they could also be other components, like your country, your faction, or your character, or the advisors in SeaFall.

Changing the World. Legacy mechanics can also change the world in specific ways. City populations change in the Pandemic Legacy games, while worldwide achievements and prosperity accrue in Gloomhaven. The joy of a Legacy game is that you don’t just write these changes down on world sheet; instead you get to make evocative, visible changes to the components — primarily the game board, but possibly other boards or cards that show the states of various parts of the world.

Exploring the World. SeaFall and Pandemic Legacy Season 2 took the next step by starting the game with a largely blank board the characters can explore. (Gloomhaven takes a somewhat smaller scale approach by letting players locate adventure locations upon the board.) Exploration is perhaps the best embodiment and use of Legacy play to date, because it combines the category’s Hidden Secrets and its Modifiable Components to allow the players to actually expand their game world.This sort of unknown discovery was entirely unknown in the board game world prior to the advent of Legacy mechanics. As players uncover and place stickers, they’re truly finding something new.

Rule-Changing Mechanics

Legacy games are meant to be played over many sessions of play: typically 15-20. To support this length of play typically requires one last Legacy element: ever-changing rules.

Changing the Rules. Legacy games have generally embraced rules updates by leaving gaps in their rulebooks to be filled in by later stickers. Charterstone may offer the most extreme example: Jamey Stegmaier originally considered leaving the rules entirely blank, but even after he moved away from that, he still produced a rulebook missing half of its rule “cards”.

There are two big advantages to changing rules:

1. They can allow players to play an introductory version of the game first time out.
2. They can minorly or majorly modify how the game works over time, creating enormous variability and thus replayability.

There’s no reason that a Legacy game at the end of its run has to even be in the same category of play as a Legacy game at the start (well, except you might alienate players).

Changing the Threats. The threats and challenges that the players are facing can change over time. Obviously, this is the most relevant in a co-op game like Pandemic Legacy but even SeaFall or Risk: Legacy can change the obstacles that the players might face.

Changing the Goals. Finally, a Legacy game can change its goals. This is typically done with cards: mission cards in Risk Legacy and objective cards in Charterstone and Pandemic Legacy. Pandemic Legacy shows that these goals can have complexity: players might have mandatory and optional objectives, and they might have to fulfill one or many. The other option is for a Legacy game to change its goals using scenarios. This is a somewhat more old-school design that doesn’t entirely take advantage Legacy games’ Modifiable Components, but it still works well enough, particularly if a game has a huge number of scenarios, as is the case in Gloomhaven.

Conclusion

This article isn’t meant to be an end-all and be-all of mechanics that create Legacy play in games. Instead, it’s a catalogue of what’s been done before, which might in turn inspire new ideas for Legacy play.

There’s also a deeper level of design that underlies these mechanics: the questions of how these Legacy changes are instituted and why players find them intriguing. That’s the topic of the last (for now?) article in this series on Legacy Play, which will appear in two weeks.

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