it’s pixel sundays, and i’m going to start posting characters from my new print, EVERYONE. above you can see just nine of the 204 characters that make up the print.
one of these faces – can you guess who? – is my friend miguel, a level-headed character who straddles the worlds of child and adult. miguel does a tremendous service for the rest of my circle of friends by buying all the board games so the rest of us can play them. recently he bought me a copy of risk legacy, because he wanted to play it but didn’t trust himself not to immediately OPEN EVERYTHING. you see, risk legacy is a board game that changes over the course of many plays: players found cities by putting stickers on the board, put stickers on cards that make them permanently more valuable, and – when special conditions are achieved, like one player winning at least twice or firing three missiles at once (a guaranteed victory) – packets can be opened that contain new rules that overwrite portions of the rulebook and introduce new cards and pieces. if you happen to remove absolutely everything from the box, you find this. amazing.
the parts of the game that are still risk aren’t very compelling to me. even though the designers have done a lot to make the game faster and to give players the choice of cashing in accumulated resources to replenish their armies, it still has the risk problem where the player who takes the lead in terms of army size is probably going to stay there until she wins, and other players will have fewer and fewer choices as the game goes on. but the idea of a board game that changes over time is nonetheless really appealing to me. last time i played, the winner chose to apply a penalty to australia – the easiest continent in the game to overrun and hold, supplying the player controlling it with a troop bonus every turn – making the bonus less valuable and australia a less desirable stronghold. i’m excited to see people perform this experiment with other games. we’ve been talking about what it could add to CLUE.
11 comments
Klick of the Month Theme?
they sell sheets of sticker paper at like staples, right?
Haven’t played the legacy version yet, but if the strongest player stays in the lead in standard risk then you’re playing it wrong.
There is always a pivot point when the strongest player starts to gain as many resources per turn as all the other players combined and then the game is effectively over. Up to that point the outcome can always be changed. Also games with escalating card values remove the issue completely.
ugh… meant to post about persistent game states, not risk strategy.
The idea sounds really cool. The only other example I can think of where one game effects the next is the card game capitalism http://www.pagat.com/climbing/asshole.html which as a bonus has a mild D/s feel to it.
GODDAMNIT MIGUEL NO ONE KNOWS WHAT YOU MEAN WHEN YOU ONLY SAY A FEW WORDS
YOU HAVE TO EXPLAIN WHAT YOURE TALKING ABOUT
Not exactly persistence, but when I was a kid my brother and I used to play a version of Clue we devised where each player had three pawns, and when the murderer was revealed the player controling that pawn would hand over his other two to his opponent, then the “murderer” would try to escape before being caught by the others.
It helped speed up the investigations since we could each be in three places at once. It also added an element of strategy to when the investigation would start to wind down, as the player controlling the murderer pawn might realize who the killer was first, and attempt to discreetly give the killer a head start to escape before the deed was revealed.
Essentially the first game became a device for determining the starting conditions of the “real” game.
fixing cluedo would likely take drastic measures… can’t even imagine where to begin.
most people start by ditching the board. i think we should cover it in stickers instead. i like the idea of players leaving booby-traps for future players to fall into. anything to give the board a purpose, really.
my friend liz also suggested that characters could gain notoriety as they become repeat murderers. COLONEL MUSTARD’S KILLED TWICE BEFORE, I BET IT’S HIM AGAIN. maybe a serial killer gets extra cards in the deck, but only enough to slightly increase the chance that she’ll be the killer – more for the psychological effect on the players. maybe it IS colonel mustard this time!!
More cards in the deck means that you are more likely to see them come up in someone’s hand, so in addition to being more likely to be the killer they also get better at making a believable alibi.
ACTUALLY THAT WAS ME ABOUT COLONEL MUSTARD, TARDO
i was like why does everyone keep inviting him to parties HE HAS A TRAIL OF BLOOD BEHIND HIM
which i think i heard somewhere else anyway oh whatever its not a unique idea anyway i just want to yell
Haha, i can see Australia going from the most wanted to the least-wanted area after a few games. That’s how my brother won every game. Or rather, made everyone else quit by taking hours to take down his atrocious wall of X’s and V’s
This reminds me of an idea I had for a card game where certain cards would change the rules of the game. It was inspired by a puzzle in the Fool’s Errand where you didn’t know the scoring rules at first: http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/fools-errand/screenshots/gameShotId,87609/
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