A Legion of Legacies, Part Four: Legacy Emotions & Agency

Welcome to the fourth article in a series about our industry’s newest category of play: Legacy Games. Previous articles in this series discussed: Legacy Play (an overview); Legacy Venn (a definition); and Legacy Mechanics (a toolbox). This final (for now) article in the series is going to look at Legacy mechanics from a few different directions by focusing on Legacy Emotions and Legacy Agency.

(As for me: my Legacy adventures continue, and I continue to love the continuity and the idea of building something from session to session. During our last Pandemic Legacy Season 2 session, we finally managed to recon one of the areas laid out at the start of the game, and that was very fulfilling; Pandemic Legacy Season 2 continues to be a well-designed and inventive game. Then, in our last SeaFall session we did something that changed the whole game, and we had to figure out what that meant; SeaFall continues to be a messy and chaotic but fun game.) Continue reading

A Legion of Legacies, Part Three: Legacy Mechanics

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. Continue reading

The Anatomy of Racing Games: The Wider World

This winter, I’ve been talking about racing games. My first article in this series gave an overview of great racing mechanics and my second article talked about four categories of games that were very similar to racing games … but weren’t quite perfect matches.

This final article goes further afield by looking at two more categories of games that are pretty distant from racing, but still share the core characteristics of moving quickly across a board to meet some goal. But that’s not all: I always want to talk about how all games are racing games … for some definitions of all. Continue reading

The Anatomy of Racing Games: Close Cousins

Four weeks ago I wrote about some of the best aspects of racing games, but in doing so I maintained a very narrow definition, limiting myself to those games that focused exclusively on racing. However, that’s not the whole story. There are many games that hybridize racing mechanics in a variety of ways, and I’m going to cover them in this article and in the finale to this trilogy in two weeks time.

This time around, I’m covering the close cousins: four game categories that definitely include racing, but which miss the core definition of racing games in a variety of ways.

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The Anatomy of Racing Games: What Makes a Great Race

Racing games are the least common denominator of board games. Candyland (1949) certainly isn’t a well-respected game nor are other roll-and-move games. However, there are also plenty of modern racing eurogames which are great. I’ve got quite a few of them in my permanent collection, including Around the World in 80 Days (2004), Cartagena (2000), Fast Flowing Forest Fellers (2008)The Quest for El Dorado (2017), and Snow Tails (2008).

So what makes the difference?

I think six different attributes contribute to great racing game play — elements that have largely appeared since the eurogame explosion of the ’90s. I’ve listed them here in decreasing order of importance. Great racing games don’t usually have all of them; in fact, that’d probably be too much! But the really good racing games tend to feature several of these attributes, particularly the higher ranked ones. Continue reading

A Legion of Legacies, Part Two: Legacy Venn

In “A Legion of Legacies, Part One”, I wrote about the general tropes of Legacy games like Risk Legacy (2011), Pandemic Legacy (2015, 2017), and SeaFall (2016): what they are, why they’re controversial, and what makes them great.

Though Legacy games are quite innovative, they’re not something that emerged fully formed from designer Rob Daviau’s brow. Instead. they’re part of a larger stream of game design that goes back many years. In fact, I’d more specifically define them as a combination of three major game design elements: campaign play, hidden secrets, and modifiable components.

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A Legion of Legacies, Part One: Legacy Play

Six years ago, Rob Daviau come up with an interesting new idea that would form the basis of RIsk Legacy (2011). Imagine a game that can be played multiple times, forming a campaign; but also imagine that game changing over time, with secrets being revealed from game to game, while the game itself is irrevocably changing. Cards are destroyed and stickers are applied to various components; the board, the cards, and the player roles all mutate, both improving and degenerating over multiple plays. It turns out that this second element, of dramatically changing game elements, bolsters the first element, of multiple plays, creating a real gaming innovation.

Risk Legacy was immediately a hit, but it took several years (and a few more outings) for the “Legacy” idea to catch on more broadly. It’s only recently that it’s blossomed, with multiple Legacy games coming out in 2017-2018. Continue reading

Deck Management is the New Rondel

It’s been over a decade now since Mac Gerdts produced Antike (2005). Its core mechanic was simple but innovative: allow players to take actions for their turns, but place all of those actions in a circle (on a rondel). Then, limit how far a player can advance on the rondel each turn. In Antike, you usually move just 1-3 spaces on the 8-space rondel, but you can spend resources for more advancement.

This limits players how often players can take specific actions. The result is an interesting puzzle of play. How can you successfully combine together several disparate actions to make a winning strategy? Do you streak around the rondel to get to the “good” actions more quickly, or you do slowly edge around to get a little of everything?

A designer can also have a lot of fun with the rondel, choosing whether to put the same action on multiple spaces (such as the duplication of the “maneuver” action in Antike) and choosing how to arrange all of the spaces to maximize efficiency, to maximize player frustration, or toward some other goal.

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The Design and Care of a Tile-Based City Builder

Tile-based city building games are among my favorites. That’s in large part due to the creativity that they introduce. I mean, I’m one of the generation that grew up with SimCity (1989), obliviously building until the sun began to flood into my college dorm room, suggesting that it was time to be off to bed. I love being able to put together the puzzle pieces of a city, and a good tile-based city builder lets you do that.

City TycoonThe General Shape of the Game

When I’m talking about tile-based city builders, I’m specifically limiting my consideration to game designs that meet several criteria:

  1. Obviously, they allow you to build cities out of tiles: usually square tiles, but occasionally hexes.
  2. Often, you’ll have your own city that you’re working on … but quite a few games instead have you contributing to to a joint city.
  3. The tiles that you place are complete and coherent buildings, businesses, residences, or other structures within a city. They’re not just parts of a whole.

There are probably hundreds of tile-based city games that I could have picked from in writing this article. I opted for the ones that I know the best, because I’ve played them. I’ve mostly focused on recent ones. My complete list for this article includes: Acquire (1964), Alhambra (2003), Between Two Cities (2015), Big City (1999)Carcassonne: The City (2004), Chinatown (1999), City Tycoon (2011), Key to the City: London (2016), Quadropolis (2016), Saint Malo (2012), Suburbia (2012), and Urbania (2012). Obviously I could have picked others (and I may expand this article in the future).  Continue reading

The Design of a Resource-Efficiency Game

A resource-efficiency game focuses on turning resources into victory points through a chain of actions. It’s a very common design style for euro games, but also one with considerable room for variety.

The recently released Manhattan Project: Chain Reaction (2016) shows the style at its simplest. You start out with worker resources. You turn those into yellow cake, which you turn into uranium, which becomes victory-point bombs. There’s a single development path for a four-link chain. The game is all in how fast you can walk that path.

Catan ConflictThe ever-popular Catan (1995) shows a different methodology. A variety of resources become roads, settlements, and cities. You can also look at this as a four-link chain: resources are necessary to create roads, which are necessary to build settlements, which in turn upgrade to cities. However, as with many more complex resource-efficiency games, there’s a feedback loop: settlements and cities can create more resources. Thus the game becomes not just about maximizing efficiency but also maximizing opportunities. Continue reading