My family and I had an interesting conversation at lunch the other day, comparing the relative merits of various legacy board games we have played. The particular games we compared were:
- Machi Koro Legacy, which was recently completed by me and my elder three sons
- Clank! Legacy, which was completed earlier this year by me, my wife, and my elder two sons
- Charterstone, which was completed about 1.5 years ago by me, my wife, and my elder two sons
The conversation started with a discussion of Machi Koro Legacy and my surprise at how it was only minimally customizable. While there are some decisions you make during the game that stay throughout the campaign, there's not the kind of customization you get from the other two games, by naming cards or taking different branching paths, for example. We compared it to Charterstone, which had the most customization of any of these games. Playing it together is honestly one of my favorite gaming memories. However, we feel no desire to pull it out and play it again. The times we've tried that, it felt like the decisions were already made, and nobody wanted to play in a haphazard starting region. By contrast, Clank! Legacy involved enjoyable customization of cards and the board, with names that evoke memories of the campaign, and yet it still feels like just a good game to play. My starting deck is a bit different than my son's, but it feels quite different from the starting conditions in Charterstone.
Putting this in a visual form, we get something like this:
The hypothesis we formed was that we would be more interested in replaying legacy games that sit in the middle of the customization spectrum. Three data points is hardly enough to draw grand conclusions, but I did think about how Gloomhaven would fit into this. It has a kingdom's worth of customization, but after my son and I finished what we perceived as the "main" storyline, and we had no more hooks to draw us forward, we lost most of our interest in playing any more. There are a few character classes we did not unlock, but it wasn't clear that any of the locations we had unlocked were going to advance us in any interesting direction. Our campaign just sputtered and stopped.
To be clear, we were only talking about desire to replay post-campaign. We enjoyed all of these games while playing them, and I have no regrets about any. Also, desire to replay should not be conflated with replayability: all of them are replayable, but the only one that comes back to the table periodically is Clank! Legacy.
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