Board games are undergoing a revival - and for the first time, players' cardboard crimes have real-world consequences. It all started with a game of Cluedo: "I always wondered why they kept getting invited to dinner when all they did was murder people," says Rob Daviau, co-designer of Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, the highest-ranked game of all time on the BoardGameGeek website.
Released in October 2015, Pandemic Legacy demonstrated that a cardboard game can have all the dynamism of TV and video games. The trick? Add a plot. When developing the title, Daviau teamed up with former Silicon Valley user-experience designer Matt Leacock. Riffing on Leacock's 2013 debut game Pandemic, in which players battle to stop four killer plagues overwhelming the world, Legacy added stickers, a drip-feed of new rules and sealed boxes players only open as the story moves on. One mass-extinction event later, the Legacy board game genre was born.
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Pandemic is unlikely to challenge the likes of Hasbro, but its initial run of 80,000 sold out - not bad for an industry where 20,000 units is considered good business. "These games have two pillars: permanent change and adding new content as you play," Daviau says. Other titles are now running with the idea, including heavyweights such as Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, which creates seven years at wizarding school, and Gloomhaven, a sprawling simulator that plays like a table-top version of The Witcher video game.
His next project, Pandemic Legacy: Season 2, out later this year, tells the story of survivors exploring a devastated Earth 71 years on. The rest is a mystery. Leacock says that's exactly why it caught on in the first place: people love surprises. "You get a lot of stagecraft and keep things hidden for reveals later," he says. "There are twists and turns; developing an arc is fun. If you make a permanent change, you're always questioning your decision. There's no going back."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
