2024: The Year of Legacy

A Brief History of Gaming:


I was in college when I first played Catan. The year was around 2008. The second time I played the game was in 2009, with a friend in Germany. The third time was 2012 in China.

For years Catan was the be-all and end-all of board games for me. On Sunday nights my wife and I would play with another couple. Two years of Sundays. I owned all of the expansions and kept the pieces in plastic sandwich containers inside of a portable cooler. My Catan set would travel from China to the US and back again each Summer. I loved Catan. Now I don't. Because things change. Because the world moves on.

Right before the 2020 Pandemic I started getting into Ticket to Ride. I had owned the base game for a while, but when I started playing the spin-offs and expansion maps, my interest started to peak. In the Spring, the world shut down and time stood still. At the advent of the pandemic, Ticket to Ride became an obsession, and I purchased every set using Covid relief funds.

As the pandemic dragged on, new board games were added to my collection. Games like Wingspan, Kingdomino, and Colt Express. But it was Carcassonne that took over my play area in 2022. The year began with the purchase of a Big Box and continued with expansions and mini-expansions. I'm not sure how many individual square Carcassonne tiles I own, but it's got to be over one thousand.

I have heard that Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, and Carcassonne are the three big gateway games into the world of connoisseur board games. I soon learned the genres, classifications, and jargons that accompany the hobby. Terms like "Worker Placement", "Engine Building", "Card Drafting", "Press-Your-Luck", "Cooperative Games", "Eurogames", and "Legacy Games". I'll come back to "Legacy Games" in a minute.

During the pandemic I crowdfunded "Everdell: The Complete Collection" and the behemoth of a box finally shipped to me in the fall of 2022. From November 2022 through October 2023 my wife and I played through Everdell and its four main map expansions. But the box came with so much content, I haven't even touched the fifth major expansion.

As I type these words, the clocks around the globe begin to strike midnight- moving from time zone to time zone like dominos. 2024 has arrived to planet Earth. For me, 2020 was the year of Ticket to Ride, 2021 was the year of Carcassonne, and 2023 was the year of Everdell. So I have chosen 2024 to be the year of Legacy Games. But what is a Legacy Game? 

What is a Legacy Game?

I have never played a proper Legacy Game (except for maybe one). But according to my internet research, here are the elements that make up a typical Legacy Game.

1) The game is played over a series of chapters, with each new chapter introducing new rules, elements, or scenarios.

2) There is a winner at the end of each chapter, but sometimes a cumulative winner at the end of the final chapter.

3) Many Legacy Games come with mystery boxes, keeping players in the dark about what will come next. In this way Legacy Games can only properly be played through one time, because on subsequent play-throughs players will already know these secrets.

4) Some Legacy Games come with stickers which can modify the rules or the board itself.

Dungeons and Dragons could be an early example of a the idea behind Legacy Games. But it was game desinger, Rob Daviau that invented this board game genre in the early 21st century. Daviau originally pitched a legacy version of Clue, but it was his Risk Legacy (2011) that became the first published game to use the format. Daviau followed this with Pandemic Legacy in 2015.

My introduction into Legacy Games will be a recent Rob Daviau game: "Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West" which he co-created with Alan R. Moon and Matt Leacock. I received this game for Christmas this year and over the past few days have unboxed it and begun reading the rulebook (which is missing rules- 30 blank rectangles that get added as the game progresses).

2024: The Year of Legacy 

And So...

The moment has been prepared for. I have acquired four Legacy Games for 2024 and I have recruited my wife into being my lone companion on this journey. Here is a rundown:

Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West 12 Chapters

Dorfromantik         6 Chapters

Charterstone         12 Chapters

My City         24 Chapters




And as the Central Time Zone draws closer to midnight, I must close out this post. The lines have been drawn, the colors chosen. Red, for Brock. Green, for Cathy. These banners selected long ago- and for the rest of our lives will represent our respective forces. In this case our armies are tiny plastic trains. 

As the Danish say, "Leg Godt!"



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