2024: Year of Legacy Games

I've never played through a Legacy Game, so I don't want to generalize, but in regards to "Legends of the West" I would like to make a general statement. Legends of the West is a base game with 8 different expansions. In our family, we like expansions. Some expansions (such as Badlands) feels familiar. There are shares to collect (in a similar fashion to Ticket to Ride: Pennsylvania.  Great Plains also establishes a familiar  rule.  Players can claim company towns that other players must pay to use (present in Ticket to Ride: Old West) Additionally the introduction of trackbeds is similar to Ticket to Ride: France. The other expansions feel new to me. Florida has a thematic circus passports which is reliant on a sticker mechanism. But since the stickers might run out, it has a press-your-luck feel. Haunted Wastes (opened today) is even more thematic. Tunnels are featured on other Ticket to Ride maps, but are used in a new way here (sort of similar to port cards in Ti...

It's 1877 and somewhere in America-   P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Hippodrome is rolling down the tracks. Could it be on its way to your town? On our fifth play-through of "Ticket to ride Legacy Legends of the West", Cathy and I really started to get into the flow of the game. We were earning coins by laying down company routes. We were earning cards by rolling into big cities. We were staking claim to the west by staking stickers onto frontier territories. We were stringing together circus trains, and piggybacking, and paying our dues to the company towns. We were utilizing employees and pulling out postcards and taking advantage of events as they cycled through the deck. We were drawing new tickets like nothing in the world could ever-ever stop us and we were in the flow. And in the end she beat me. At first it was just by two dollars until she pulled out some kind of Port Master employee card and she realized she had beaten me by about ...

On a cold winter's morning, on a train bound for nowhere... Cathy and I continued our journey through the late 1800s. The nation's railroads continued to expand westward as three railroad barons waged a war of territory control. As the game progressed, stickers were strategically planted on the cardboard field. When an event card was drawn that allowed us to trade rainbow locomotives for new company towns, I was the first to claim a new town, followed by Cathy, followed by myself again. Another event allowed Mama O'Connell to claim company towns. This card showed up twice before being discarded from the game at round's end. The final tally: Mama O'Connell: 3 Company Towns: Omaha, Detroit, Nashvilles Cathy: 2 Company Towns: St. Louis, Buffalo Brock: 3 Company Towns: Chicago, Davenport, Kansas City My strategy, was to completely block off the western section of the map. Cathy now cannot reach the upper midwest without going through at least one of my company towns, th...

 In a lot of ways Legacy Games are like video games. In the first level of a video game you learn the basic rules. Then slowly, as new levels are added, you learn more and more rules until you end up being a semi-expert of a very complex system. As Cathy and I continued our journey through Legends of the West, the complexity ramped up. There's a lot of upkeep here for a Ticket to Ride game. The weight has gone from light to medium just in the first few rounds as stickers are continuously added to the rulebook. Cards are being introduced and retired from play at a fast clip. All of the sudden we are tracking Employees and postcards and Company Towns. Ticket to Ride can be a stressful game when you aren't sure if you are going to complete all of your routes before your opponent lays down her last train. The stress is ramped up when you are trying to juggle new strategies coming down the track with every play-through. This is certainly a unique Ticket to Ride game, but as we work...

First and foremost... Spoilers. In the unlikely event that anyone other than my wife is reading this post: Don't! Don't read this post unless: 1) You have already played through Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West Chapter 1.  2) You never plan to play through Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West 3) You do plan to play through Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West but you want to be spoiled anyway. The Setup The year is 1865 and there has been a murder out west. One train baron has killed another. Fortunately, we are out east. Brock represents The Pennsylvania Railroad Company (est. 1846) Cathy represents The New Haven and Hartford Railroad  (est. 1833) The Journey This game is definitely a switch-up from the classic Ticket to Ride games that my wife and I have played through many times before. My first shock was that claiming long routes did not result in any bonus points (or in this case, money). In fact, the only way to earn money during the game itself was finishi...