Risk Legacy has some great and innovates mechanics that make the game evolve as you play through it. If you are interested in how it work, and not worried about spoilers, read on.
The idea behind Risk Legacy is that choices you make during one game play permanently alter the game for future plays. For example, you start with a "scar" card that has a buff of debuff effect like +1 to highest attacker die, or +1 to highest defender die. You play the card by putting a sticker on a location, it takes effect immediately, but also lasts forever. Or until someone covers it. At the end of each game you can generally found a minor city. If you win you get to found a major city, or name a continent, or some other sweet bonuses. Major cities are places that only the founder can start in, so they start to define repeating strategies. Thats the basic idea, I'm not going to explain everything, but I'll give you some description of what we did to the board and how it affected the repeated plays.
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| Before the first play. |
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| After our first 3 games, all in just one night. 3 games of Risk in one night??? Do you guys play for like 12 hours? No, the first few games of Risk Legacy go very quickly. You just need 4 Red Stars to win, which translates to taking 2 enemy Headquarters in the first few games. You can see that South America is becoming a hot spot for stickers. There is a Mercenary Camp (free dude each turn), 3 cities (including a major city), and there are Ammo Shortages in North America to keep people off the border. One player used South America as his base for a long time after this. Another player has set up a fortified major city in India. And another player has named Europe "Erik's Bane". That was a horrible idea, I think he got the +1 dude continent bonus for naming it like one round in all future play throughs. You can see that most races have a Green power, you get that before the first play. One race has a blue power, you get that for getting knocked out of the game. That was me. Too bad you can only get one blue power, or I would have had 4 powers by the end of the first night. |
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| I managed to win the 4th game, and build a fortified major city in Canada. I wanted to be in the Western US, but there was an Ammo Shortage. |
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| After the 5th game South America is looking even better with a new Ammo Shortage in Africa, so all border now have debuffs. Australia has been named, by guy who founded the major city in India usually trys to control Australia. By this point our games are taking at least 1.5 hours, often more. |
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| During our 6th game we caused a Nuclear Winter by playing 3 missiles in the same combat. Two were played by people trying to win the game, the 3rd was played by someone who just wanted to open one of the secret packs. So just north of Australia becomes a Nuclear Fallout zone, where you loose half your army just for entering. The guy who starts in India got totally fucked this round, because on the first play (and some event cards) every army adjacent to the Fallout Zone gets half killed. Also there is a new playable race, the Mutants. They don't die on entering the Fallout zone. So the obvious new strategy is to play Mutants and control Australia. Anybody who attacks you looses half their army, nobody would be that stupid. Or would they? (Hint: I do it in an upcoming game). Also check out the powers on the races, we still dont have many. |
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| After the 7th we see our first brown power on a race. The brown power are related to Missile Tokens. You always start with at least 1 Missile Token, more than 1 depending mostly on how many games you have won and some race powers. At some point we revealed a rule where you bid for first turn, first race pick, first location pick, starting army size, and starting coins (the things you turn in for lots of armies). Someone people are starting to start in different places just to screw other people out of being able to start in the major cities. Also I wanted to have a good option for playing mutants, so I founded a major city in Japan to have more options at the start of the game. |
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| After the 8th game you can see 3 green Biohazard squares. These kill 1 dude per turn, unless you are a mutant, in which case they give you 1 dude per turn. Someone was a major dick and put a biohazard on the major city in South America. This means one player almost always had a biohazard on his Headquarters. Also look at the bottom of India, that black tick mark is a new Sea Path to Alaska (which also has a black tick above it). This was a reward for a quest to control all of the Islands on the map. I managed to do it by attacking Australia through the Nuclear Fallout, which surprised everybody and left me very weak. I used the quest reward to put a direct path between the Headquarters of the two strongest players. Completing that quest and dropping the sea lane was my most memorable achievement in all of Risk Legacy, better than any of my wins. |
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| Our 9th and possibly last game. This game felt like classic Risk, which means that it was a horrible slugfest that went on for 2 hours after anybody cared about the outcome. There were multiple win attempts with good odds that got dicefucked, extending the game, and making nobody happy. The luckiest player got knocked out, so he could go home. One particular win attempt involved something like a 17 dude army vs 3 counties with 1 dude each. After an epic dicefucking ruing a win attempt involving something like 17 dudes vs 3 counties with 1 dude each, one player calculated the odds had been about 1 in 3000 of him not winning. We haven't touched the game since that night. There are still unopened packages with new rules. |
This isn't intended as a review, but I'll give you my opinion anyway. Risk Legacy is awesome, except that underneath, it is still Risk.
Do you have any epic dicefucking stories from Risk Legacy? Post them or anything else in the comments.
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