So far consisting of Risk Legacy, Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, and SeaFall, the system boils down to a basic principle – after a game is completed, it doesn’t fully reset. Instead, elements of previous games carry over to future sessions in the form of stickers you place on the board, secret compartments within the box that contain new mechanics that open when certain criteria is met, and even ripping up cards. It can be difficult to have a continuous campaign, as it more or less requires a consistent gaming group, but if you’re able to pull it off, it can make for some really unique fun.
Daviau currently has numerous new games in the works, including a sequel to Pandemic Legacy, and he was able to find time in his schedule to let us ask him a few questions.
GameSkinny: Do you remember how you first had the idea for Legacy?
GS: So objectively, your most popular game is Pandemic Legacy: Season 1. It’s been sitting at #1 on BoardGameGeek for what feels like ages at this point.
GS: I believe Season 2 has been coming along in the background, and so, without giving away spoilers for those who haven’t had a chance to play through the first one, what has it been like to work on what’s essentially a sequel to a board game? And will there be options to have experiences with the first game carry over to the new one?
GS: Yeah, makes sense. Is there any idea of a tentative release window, or is it still too early to tell?
I started the sequel before the first one came out. The game was going to come out in October of 2015, and we started Season 2 at the beginning, or April, of 2015. So there’s this weird cycle of starting before the other one comes out.
So the good news is we had no idea how successful it was going to be, so we weren’t sort of constrained or crippled or otherwise affected by its success when we started Season 2. And in many ways it was great because we had tried to figure out in Season 1, how a Legacy game would work as a cooperative game, and how it would work specifically in Pandemic, and we had already done a lot of that work and didn’t have to reinvent the wheel there. What we did have to do is say, okay, we did all these cool things in Season 1; how do we not just do the same thing again in Season 2? So it was like pushing ourselves to come up with whole new ideas.
In answer to the second part of your question, there is no mechanical connection between Season 1 and Season 2. Season 2 takes place 71 years into the future. Because of the different end states of Season 1, and we didn’t know at the time how many people would finish on a high note or a low note, there’s a lot of variables about how a player’s world can look at the end of Season 1. And so we made the decision to just move it – sort of reunite the timelines, I guess. By moving it 71 years into the future you can say, okay, these people did these things, but – and I’m not gonna spoil it – then something else happened, and then you all sort of ended up in the same place.
And I know that’s a disappointment to some people who wanted it to fully connect, but we were trying to figure out – the variable end states would have left dozens, if not hundreds, of places we would have to pick up from and all have it work, and that was a bit of a difficult matrix.
GS: The Legacy system has been pretty successful, to the extent that other designers have also tried their hands at making Legacy games with that system. Do you have any thoughts on that?
GS: Well, my next question was going to be if there were any favorites that weren’t made by you, but you kind of answered that I guess.
GS: Looking back at your three big Legacy titles – Risk, Pandemic, and SeaFall last year – what are some ideas that you hit on that you think have worked especially well? And is there anything you wish you’d done differently?
GS: And things that you think worked especially well?
Pandemic, Matt [Leacock] and I messed up both conceptually and executionally something – when you’re about 2/3 of the way through the game, if you’re sort of falling behind and we want to get you back on track, we have a little way to do [that] ,so that’s sort of clumsy in concept and clumsy in execution, that justifiably we get some criticism for. Also we did some weird numbering mistakes. Like we have the big packages that you open, and there’s eight of them numbered one to eight. And then the dossier doors also start over at one to eight, so you don’t necessarily know which number to open. In Season 2, the packages are one to eight, and then the dossier starts with 10. There’s no duplication of numbers.
SeaFall I really like, but the feedback has been that it needed another round of development. I think it had taken so long that the publisher and myself were – I was done. I couldn’t figure out any way to do anything new with it and I thought it was perfect. The publisher knew I wanted it out the door and they just kind of put it out the door, and I think looking back now, I can certainly say, ‘Oh, I wish that one of us had said hold on, give us six months to play it and chop it and make some edits on it.’ So that one was so big and so sprawling and I was trying to grow a business at the same time that it both consumed my time and didn’t have enough time, ironically. So, you know, there’s always things in games I’ve worked on that once they’re out and you get feedback or you just get some time on it, you say, oh, okay, I could have done that differently. I think that’s just the nature of it.
GS: What do you see as the future of the Legacy system? Do you see a sort of future or a way you want to evolve it?
I think the story we ended up putting in Pandemic Legacy resonated with people, which is interesting because it takes place over the course of something like 18 cards. There’s very little that we tell you about the story, and it’s just interesting how people put together the story. There’s a hidden packet in Risk Legacy that I still continue to enjoy, and that was so whimsical that I don’t know when or if I’ll ever do that again. There’s something that people who get like 2/3 of the way through SeaFall and open a packet – there’s a little trick in there that I also particularly like that I’m being coy about, that I think is great and fits narratively and people have really had sort of a jaw-dropping moment for it.
So yeah, it’s weird. Some of the things that I think of for Legacy games are not necessarily just game design ideas but experience ideas, almost like magic tricks. What if we hid something? What if we hid something in plain sight? These sorts of things. I’m happy to be able to think that way when thinking about a game.
GS: Before we wrap up, next month, you’re dipping into Lovecraft a bit with the release of Mountains of Madness. From the premise, it almost sounds like a sort of Betrayal at House on the Hill setup, where it starts out fully cooperative, but your teammates slowly get crazier and crazier as you progress. Can you speak to any similarities or differences between the two?
Really, the heart of the game is all players have 30 seconds on a sand timer to communicate what they’re going to do as a group, what cards they’re going to play to deal with things, which is interesting. Some people just mess that up right out of the gate. Like, very simply, there’s a sand timer and they just panic. Because when the timer goes off you can’t talk about or clarify any plans, you just have to play the card or cards or don’t play the cards you think everyone agreed to. And then what happens is as you both succeed and fail, because it’s a Lovecraft thing, you get more and more restrictions on what you can communicate. So you might have a madness that you can only communicate with the player on your right. You do not talk to anyone else, you do not listen to anyone else, you do not hear anyone else. You start putting four people around a table, each with these various conflicting madnesses, and it becomes a real challenge to communicate effectively.
GS: So you’re challenging another board game preconception – that players will always be able to talk at will with each other.
GS: Lastly, anything else you want to say to get people hyped for the game?
A big thank you to Rob for taking the time to answer my questions!
Here’s a link to Rob Daviau’s website. You can also check out his page on BoardGameGeek, or follow him on Twitter.
