Friend of the show and returning guest Rob Daviau joins Rob and Julian to talk about his new game, Risk: Legacy. They talk about how Legacy uses unlocks and persistent changes to deepen the standard Risk experience. Daviau describes lessons learned during playtesting about how players learn games and fail to make good long-term decisions. Why have some gamers been so resistant to the changes in Legacy? Does Legacy suggest a line of development for board gaming? Is it all a nefarious plot to make people buy more games?
Risk: Legacy is available right now at game stores, and on Amazon next week.
Thanks for the episode guys. I really enjoyed this one. I saw the german edition at Spiel in Essen and can’t wait to get my hands on the game.
Greetings.
Must say that I loved the episode. Sounds like a great game.
Wow, I don’t think I’ve been as excited by the prospect of playing Risk since I was 11.
I was wondering if either Julian or either of the Robs remember a MTG set called Unglued?
It featured cards which had to be ripped up to be used (along with cards which required people to do things like sing to use them etc.).
I remember at the time there was allot of resistance to using the cards in my regular MTG group(although part of this probably came because as a CCG MTG made people intrinsically value cards).
Using a card removed it from the meta game and reduced your pool of options. This created a situation where because I never really felt those cards we really part of the game, their randomness seemed ‘cheap’. It was extremely frustrating to be presented with something and have no opportunity to learn how to respond to it.
It sounds like Robs got that one covered though. Making a additive change to something which would cancel out some of the gaming ocd. Certainly I find the thought of discarding a ‘potential’ card not nearly as bad as removing one outright to use it.
I think the example of that sort of feeling in general is that as a kid someone altering a doodle I had done on a blackboard never bothered me, because i could always draw something else. But someone wiping the whole thing off made me mad as hell.
Side Note: I’d always imagine Hasbro would have some number crunching super algorithm running on a massive soulless computer for testing its games. So in some ways its comforting to know its just a group of guys playing a s*** load of games :D
Inspiring innovation from an unlikely place // Nov 29, 2011 at 12:31 am
[…] was recently on the peerless Three Moves Ahead podcast which I encourage you to listen to. Share: Subscribe: Tags: design, […]
A very interesting topic, thank you.
I, too, find it hard to inflict “damage” on a board game (or any loved property, for that matter).
The most important bit, I think, is that the game expects you to play it with a steady group, which is something I’ve rarely experienced and it might be to its detriment.
Need to play this game. I may well ‘buy’ it for someone for christmas. I would love to see a legacy iteration of Cluedo! The murderin’ Colonel Mustard needs to happen.
Holiday Guest Blog 4: Rob Daviau “Elements of Risk” // Dec 30, 2011 at 5:11 pm
[…] for a while, and a friend of Julian Murdoch even longer. He works for Hasbro and his appearance on Episode 144 to talk about his design of Risk: Legacy was one of the more popular shows of 2011. Risk gets a lot of flak on the podcast, so Rob wanted to […]