Legacy board games: How to add the drama of peril (and what does this have to do with Game Of Thrones?)

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RiskLegacy

pandemic

Janet Leigh

Legacy games break a condition that we’re all comfortable with – it makes you permanently alter the game as you play it, and this is what makes it good.You tear apart cards, scar the board with permanent stickers, and characters you play may be rendered permanently insane. Or dead. Never to be seen again. Awesome.

But why is it awesome? What’s the appeal? Why is it so wildly popular that people are grabbing at hundred-dollar-games, so that it became the Board Game Geek’s #1 game, just to destroy them?In 2011, Rob Daviau redesigned the classic world-domination game Risk to include players making permanent changes to the components of the game as you play. Good for about ten plays before this is exhausted.

He then turned his attention to Matt Leacock’s already solid co-op game Pandemic so that all the players are now working together to save the world from various plagues. If you win a chapter, open one box of components. If you lose, open a different one. Whatever effects, like Tokyo being obliterated, or a character gaining new skills, remain in effect for future plays. Again, about ten plays before you can play it no more.

With this, Daviau has brought to games two things vital to storytelling: Surprise and Permanency.

Permanency creates peril, which increases tension and drama. Your decisions matter, the risk you take is real. Well, as real as you can get in fiction. If you ended this game and started again tomorrow, Roy would still be dead, Rome still destroyed. Are you SURE you want to send him in there?

Permanency creates continuation. We don’t reset, we pick up where we left off. The storyline is waiting for us when we get back, with the physical memory of yesterday’s actions forever scorched into the components. You are reminded of your triumphs and failures from the last game, and in the essence of tragedy, your actions could spell your own future demise. As with great story structure, the memory of your defeats are apparent, and you could rise against your past and overcome what defeated you.

Surprise is now meaningful. Twists and turns are not swept behind us once we finish for the evening – they count for the long haul, so the drama is multiplied.Such storytelling is not new to games. Role-players would say that this is why they play as they fondly remember the characters they played in the 80s, of their magic-user thief that burgled the keep at Inverness, but drowned in the sewers of Lisbon.

Studies have revealed that humans are happier when they buy experiences rather than possessions. A stack of games might be good for entertaining, but the highs, dramas, emotional rushes of an experience is worth everything in your games cupboard. Only a few, storytelling games such as Betrayal at House on the Hill or others with replayability, are good for any more than ten plays before they lose their emotional appeal and gather dust.

But now we have peril in board games, and if it means the destruction of a $100 board game, then so be it. It is the bloodletting that games needed. To cite a parallel in film, people thought their main character stars were safe until Hitchcock killed off Janet Leigh mid-film. Psycho brought suspense into the cinema by letting you feel unsafe in cinemas ever after.

Popular on television now is Game Of Thrones. In this rich world, just when we think it’s safe to invest emotionally in a character, even a main character played by a high-profile actor, some nasty and usually terminal fate will befall them. Nothing is sacred, nothing is safe, the effects are permanent and unpredictable. George R. R. Martin’s fans both praise his creation and curse his betrayal in the same breath, yet can’t look away.

This is a stark change from television of old. Until the 90s, our viewing was dictated by the studio’s desire for ratings, and they played it safe and kept the same popular actors on long-term contracts. Series would reset every episode and, as enjoyable as they were, writers could only sacrifice characters we met that week.

For all the fun and meaningfulness of Star Trek, you didn’t need a ‘Previously, on Star Trek…’ because it didn’t matter, you would start with the same characters as every other week, minus some guy in a red shirt.

To be fair, you really didn’t want the risk of peril to the main crew – you wanted to feel safe in that regard – and to enjoy the situations they encountered.Very different in Battlestar Galactica. Its short story span meant that characters could permanently die, or discover they weren’t human.

That matters, you can’t take it back, and we are on an engaging emotional rollercoaster.

So, when it comes to games, we want as rich an experience as possible in the short time that we have, since experiences bond people together.If we have only one chance at an action, it will MATTER.

Have no mercy on your players.