Risk Legacy

Played an interesting game last night – Risk Legacy. It is a version of Risk, but one where the board, factions and rules change from game to game, based on what happened in previous games. I haven’t come across anything like it before – a game that requires you to apply stickers to the board, write on it, and even tear components up!

On the first play, the game is fairly vanilla, but almost immediately, you start making your version of the game unique. Players are given a “Starting Power” card with two stickers, each sticker with an power for their faction. They are instructed to stick one of their choice onto their faction card, and then tear up the “Starting Power” card, complete with the other sticker, removing it from the game forever. So people playing this game in future will be using the powers chosen by the first players.

During the course of the game, areas of the map are changed in different ways – for better or for worse – and these are reflected in more (permanent) stickers which will affect future plays. The winner of a game gets to write their name onto the leaderboard (on the game board itself), and can name a city or region – which means that this city/region is more valuable to that specific player (not faction, the person) in future games.

There are additional components in envelopes with instructions “do not open this until…” and some of these are stickers to put into (deliberately) empty places in the rule book. Thus this is a game that requires spoiler warnings, although I think I haven’t given anything away here (if you have played this game, and comment, please take the same care!)

Provision has been made for the game to be played up to 15 times. After that, it can still be played, but by that time it will have become a static game, with no more changes. However, by that time, it will be unique, unlike any other copy of Risk Legacy.

I think this game is probably best played with a regular crowd, so you can follow the changes as they happen. This was the case with the game last night – it was a joint purchase by some of the people I play with occassionally, and they were gracious enough to let me play in their world for the evening. Having been thrashed thoroughly, I was even allowed the consolation of improving my faction with an additional power, so future players using the same faction might have an easier time of it.

Pure genius.

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