If you’ve followed the website for a while, you’ll know that a few years ago I was posting about Risk Legacy, but also talking about Legacy games and what games I thought would make a cool Legacy game, because I’m a massive fan of legacy games. You put it on the box and I’m going to be interested, even if it was disappointing, like, let’s say, SeaFall. Risk Legacy is the grand daddy of all the legacy games, but Risk is a game that I’m only just okay with, was it better in legacy form?

Risk Legacy keeps most of the same rules as the original Risk game. You still get troops based off of how many areas you control at the start of a turn. You still are rolling dice to try and take over areas, But the story of the game is different, in this, you’re still trying to take over a world that somehow was terraformed to look like Earth, just with rougher corners. Things went wrong when everyone came to the planet, so you all splintered off into groups. Each player at the start of the game gets a group and a base. The goal is to reach a certain number of victory points, and your base with worth a point as is everyone else’s bases. So you aren’t worrying about conquering everything, just getting their bases. Then, if you are knocked off the board, you can come back on the next round, so you still have a chance, though a very slim one. Also, factions have powers, but you might not always be playing the same faction so you have to know how to play different strategies with different factions.

Now, I’m going to try and talk about spoilers as little as possible as the game doesn’t have that many things to unlock, but the game was a ton of fun to play. It took Risk which can be a very long game and allowed you to focus in a few territories where your opponents had their bases. We had some games that would stretch on for a while because you’d end up with a lot of base trading so that even if you captured someone else’s base, someone had probably taken over your base the turn before, but all the games were much much faster than a normal game of Risk. It was a massive improvement, and unfortunately you only have a kind of playable copy of the base game afterwards, because I’d love to see Risk revamped to have that in it.

The special powers are great as well. It allows you to get a preferred faction, but not one that you are always going to play. It also means that you’re going to have something that makes you different. I like it when games can do that, so that even at the start of the game, you feel like you’re unique. And, not a spoiler, the factions become more diverse as the game goes on. This is interesting because it means that some factions can become stronger, so do you make changes to the faction to make them better for you now knowing that you might not get it back another game. This is another way that it is really a step up from Risk, being unique in a game where it can feel very generic is really nice. And like, I think, a good legacy game, you are different and then you can become more different and that keeps the game interesting for several games.

The set-up is also different from regular Risk. In normal Risk, every territory starts out with a troop on it, so the world is already populated for war, but that means that your troops are going to be spread quite thin even at the start. In this, you start with a base in an empty location or one that has a major city you founded earlier in the game. That’s where you start, and you can start as close or far from others as you want. You can expand out as slow or as fast as you want. It makes it a bit more of a strategic game versus just jumping straight into dice chucking. And it makes it seem like your choices matter more. There’s no trying to grab as much of Australia as possible, because you’re starting in one spot and someone could possibly block you in. Being in a remote corner or Asia can actually work because you’ll be able to expand out slowly. And, I think it helps with the speed of the game, because you aren’t always fighting each turn, so even though technically you could get to conflict faster, early turns of the game of Risk Legacy go much faster, and because you’re only dealing with trying to take out the bases, it works much smoother.

Finally, how does it compare to other Legacy games? Firstly, it doesn’t have as much to unlock. In Risk Legacy, you basically have a handful of envelopes and a couple of other spots to open. So, you aren’t opening stuff as often as you do in a game like Pandemic Legacy or even SeaFall. To go with that, since you aren’t opening as much, there isn’t as much of a story. There are a few twists that can come along the way, but it isn’t as story driven as Pandemic Legacy. There’s nothing to read at the start of each game, it’s basically put stuff down and start again. But what you do unlock, there’s a lot of fun stuff, and it has those moments of unlocking things and thinking that it is going to massively change the game, and it does. I won’t spoil what those are, but there are some very fun ones that you can get and unlock.

Overall, it was a really fun experience. I think that it still has some of the flaws of Risk because combat is still about who can roll dice with more luck than the other person. But the game length is shorter, the crazy moments of unlocking things is great, and the winning objective works really well. I don’t know that it really adds much more them to the game, but it does make it a whole lot more interesting. If you like Risk at all, Risk Legacy is going to be a really good option for you, and if you dislike Risk because of the length of the game, this could still be enjoyable. If it’s about the dice rolling combat, I’d skip it.

Overall Grade: B
Gamer Grade: B-
Casual Grade: B

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.