Most Board Games are the same every time — not in the sense that it always plays out the same, but that the game is fundamentally the same. The Legacy Game changes this. It's a type of Narrative Board Game defined by the game itself being permanently changed during sessions depending on game outcomes and player choices. Some legacy games also introduce new mechanics or game pieces gradually as the campaign goes on. Additionally, a legacy campaign may be used as a way to tell a story.
Unlike traditional board games, legacy games require players to make permanent physical changes to game components, such as writing names on cards, putting stickers on the game board, or outright destroying components. This permanently changes the game experience over the course of the campaign. Once the campaign is over, you'll usually be able to keep playing even though no further changes can be made. Some games even allow you to replay the campaign, which may or may not require you to buy a refill pack.
Tabletop RPGs and War Games, with their campaigns and enduring changesnote to the game state, can be compared to legacy games. Similarly, a few games had attempted mechanics that permanently affect future games, such as playing Magic: The Gathering for ante.note Risk Legacy, the very first true legacy game, was released in 2011, but it didn't really catch on, and the genre was mostly dormant for a few years. That all changed in 2015 with the release of the Genre Popularizer Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, which was acclaimed for its innovation, narrative and thematic elements, and soon followed by numerous other legacy games. With that said, legacy games are not universally beloved; they have attracted some criticism for removing replayability from a medium that has traditionally offered infinite amounts of it.
These games often have an element of Dynamic Difficulty — if you do poorly in one game, the game will help you do better in the next one, and vice versa. This is useful to keep the difficulty at an appropriate level, and keeps you from being annoyed that you just committed to playing a dozen games of something that's too easy/hard for you.
These games tend not to have Digital Tabletop Game Adaptations due to the special programming required for the campaign.
Sub-Trope of Narrative Board Game. Sister Trope of Campaign Game. Compare Tabletop RPG. See also Macrogame.
Examples:
Tabletop Games
- Betrayal Legacy is a legacy variation of Betrayal at House on the Hill. It tells a story and features mechanics like permanently attaching tools to specific families. Events in the story affect the house itself, determining whether certain rooms are added to or removed from the house, whether a ghost that haunts the house is helpful or hostile, and so on.
- BreaKeys was a collectable game where each player's piece interlocked and twisted with the other's until one of them broke, and the broken piece could no longer be used in future games. If the last of one's pieces broke, they would have to buy another bag if they wanted to keep playing. But, of course, since production ceased in the early 2000s, replacing them is no longer possible.
- Charterstone is a worker-placement game where you can construct buildings that are permanently added to the game by putting stickers on the board.
- Gloomhaven is a dungeon-crawler/RPG that's also a legacy game. While the rules remain the same, there are some legacy elements like destroying cards and putting stickers on the board or cards.
- In Machi Koro Legacy, the game is permanently changed depending on what is built during the game and who wins it.
- My City is a game where you build a city using polyominoes. The legacy elements include modifying the rules between games, as well as adding Dynamic Difficulty — losing players get to upgrade their setups, while winning players often have to make theirs more challenging. It's also a rare legacy game with a Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation — you can play through the whole campaign on Board Game Arena.
- Oath is a "legacy-lite" board game, in that the events and outcome of every session meaningfully changes how the next one is played (specifically determining the next game's victory condition, mixing up the layout of the board, and swapping out six denizen cards from the gameplay deck). It is not a full legacy game, because no permanent changes are made to game components and the game can, with some effort, be reset to its original, pre-first session state.
- Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 evolves and tells its story by adding new rules and components that sometimes require you to permanently alter the components of the game — you may have to write on cards, rip up cards, and place permanent stickers on components. Characters can gain new skills, suffer from detrimental effects, or even die permanently. It later received a sequel in Season 2 and a prequel in Season 0.
- Risk Legacy: To choose powers, players must pick one of their faction's two powers, put the corresponding sticker on their faction card, then destroy the card that has the other rule on it. The game box contains different sealed packages and compartments that are opened during the game, and the rule book itself will also change.
- Seafall is a game set in a world that's rediscovering seafaring technology. Its rules and board permanently change as discoveries are made.
- We Didn't Playtest This: Legacies adds Legacies cards, which contain a slot for Owner and a picture. When you win a game, you claim ownership of the last card you played by writing your name in the Owner box. The Owner of a card gets to ignore it if it would otherwise make them lose.
Trading Card Games
- Magic: The Gathering:
- The now-abandoned ante mechanic made cards permanently change ownership depending on what happened in the games.
- Two Mystery Booster test cards feature the "Legacy" keyword as a nod to legacy games. The cards using it have to be permanently modified to be used. One is a land that can make one of any color of mana, but this ability can only be used five times ever. The other is a creature where you write a property on it before the game starts.
