We’re obviously huge fans of tabletop games where the outcomes are directly affected by other players’ actions - we’ve got a pretty impressive collection of Malifaux tokens just to prove it - but this idea that games should change with each play is gathering pace elsewhere.
In an article for the Guardian, Mark Wilding looks at the rise of legacy games, where you alter the board and in some cases cards and pieces as you play, essentially meaning you can’t replay the game at a later date.
He spoke to Rob Daviau who came up with the idea while working for Hasbro, and who was responsible for the launch of Risk Legacy in 2011.
Since leaving the company a year later, he’s worked on Pandemic Legacy and is now set to release SeaFall, an entirely new game that’s been conceived around the concept. - an undertaking that he noted “takes an insane amount of time”.
Ben Hogg, marketing manager at Esdevium, explained that people are increasingly happy to buy into this format: “You’re buying into an experience. It’s introducing that aspect of narrative that you get from video games.”
Obviously buying a game and only playing it through once doesn’t suit everyone though (the story in SeaFall takes around 15 ‘games’ to conclude), and while it’s great to see things like SeaFall mixing it up in the gaming world, we like to come back to our tried and tested favourites.
Games like Malifaux, where you can build and paint your own models to assemble your crew and then pick different strategies to attempt to accomplish each time have endless possibilities and, of course, games change depending on your opponents as much as your own choices.
