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Legacy Board Game

 Legacy Board Game
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Legacy Board Game
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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 see: Experience Points 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 This was originally intended as the main way to play Magic, but it was completely abandoned early in the game's life due to unpopularity and concerns that it would get tournaments classified as gambling. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

 Legacy Board Game
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The Newest Ones in the Book
 Betrayal at House on the Hill (Tabletop Game) / int_ce6b1aa
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Legacy Board Game
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 Oath (Tabletop Game) / int_ce6b1aa
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Legacy Board Game
 Pandemic (Tabletop Game) / int_ce6b1aa
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 Risk (Tabletop Game) / int_ce6b1aa
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Legacy Board Game