320 – Room to Grow: Legacy Games

Fact – This week on the show we talk about the A320 (the most popular aircraft family in the world).

Sponsor – Visit FirstMoveFinancial.com/familygamers to schedule a quick phone and see if First Move is the right fit for you.

What We’ve Been Playing

Mada (review coming soon)
Fox in the Forest Duet
Framework (Dave’s review)
Winter (review soon)
Kabuto Sumo (review soon)
Sobek: 2 Players (review soon)
On Tour
Colorful
Oh My Brain (review soon)
Suspects: Claire Harper Takes the Stage (review soon)
Santorini
Kingdomino & Unmatched (working on that family 10×10!)

The Monthly Report

Andrew: 30 plays, H-index: 2 – Draftosaurus, Suspects

Anitra: 49 plays (ish), H-index: 3, most played: Kabuto Sumo, Draftosaurus, Mickey’s Christmas Carol

Welcome New Members

Stop in to the community and say hi!

SNAP Review – Disney Mickey’s Christmas Carol Game

This puzzle-assembling game is sturdy and perfect for young kids to play with an adult, or older kids to play on their own. It’s simple but feels classic. Elliot helps us talk about how to play.

Read the transcript or watch the video of this SNAP review.

Room to Grow: Legacy Games

Our goal with Room to Grow is to bring your kids through a series of games that grow in complexity. We do our best to start with a game that shows a mechanic or play style very simply, and then move up to a game that is a little more complex, and then one even more complex.

What is a legacy game?

A legacy board game is one in which players make permanent changes to the game itself over the course of several play sessions. Pieces may be marked up or covered with stickers and then used again, components may be permanently trashed and new pieces added (or all of the above).

(Listeners – If you’ve played a legacy game, what do you do with the components you’re told to “trash”?)

Many legacy games bring the players through some sort of story (often called a “campaign”) over a set number of plays.

A campaign brings you through some kind of a story. Not every legacy game is a campaign game, and vice-versa.

For beginners: Zombie Kidz Evolution

We’ve often called this “My First Legacy Game”. Zombie Kidz Evolution is a simple tower-defense style game. Every time you finish a game you make progress towards opening another envelope with new things to add to the game. You progress faster if you wing games, but you still get some reward just for playing, which makes it feel very forgiving.

In addition to new pieces and new rules, you also put stickers in the rulebook and on some of the bad-guy zombies.

There’s not really a story line here, but that’s OK. Our kids have loved this game and its sequel, Zombie Teenz Evolution.

You can always dial back the difficulty and play an “earlier” (easier) style. Plus there is an achievement system that keeps the game feeling fresh, even if you’ve “finished” the game.

A bit more: My City

Unusual in legacy games, My City is not cooperative. Instead, up to four players will each keep a personal board and personal pieces. These will be changed both by the decisions you make, and by how well you do in each game (1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th place).

My City is a simultaneous tile-laying, puzzley kind of game. Players who do well will be given additional challenges to make future plays harder, and players who finish poorly will be given advantages in future plays. Our biggest complaint is that the difficulty doesn’t adjust quickly enough for a family with wildly different levels of skill (like ours).

We reviewed My City early in 2021.

Play your heart out! Pandemic Legacy

We would call this a “serious” legacy game. It’s not the first one, but it is the one that took off in popularity.

If you know how to play Pandemic, you will be able to jump into Pandemic Legacy very easily. However, it’s a much harder game than the others we talked about here – and harder than the original Pandemic as well.

As with My City, the difficulty level adjusts between plays. You have two chances to successfully complete each “month”; every time you lose, you get bonuses that will help you on the next play. But when you win, these bonuses are taken away.

You must truly form a cooperative team, planning in sync, to do well in Pandemic Legacy.

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