completed Gloomhaven (Second Printing)

[John Fiala]

Just now, Carnacki the Ghost Finder said:

Thanks for the reply.  The idea of a Legacy game where you "have" to tear up a card or deface the board in some way is a new one to me.  I suppose the idea is that this "permanent" decision affects how it feels to play the game.  But I don't get it personally.  I suppose you have to try it to know what it's like.

 

The idea of one or limited use games is a relatively new, and somewhat controversial one, but there's plenty of other entertainment that we enjoy once and move on - nice meals, fireworks, jigsaw puzzles ... indeed, the first time you read (or watch) a mystery novel is very different from the second time, as the second time you already know the solution and go in to see how it comes together.  (Or not - apparently there's folks who buy books and only ever read them once.  It's not something i get. :)

 

They're not legacy games, but the 'Time Story' boardgames are all mysteries that a group pours over to solve, and once played there's not much use playing them again... which I suppose is also true of the old 'How to Host a Murder' games.

[Grumpy Cave Bear]

15 minutes ago, Carnacki the Ghost Finder said:

I'm not familiar with the concept of "Legacy" games.  Is this one?  In short: can the game be played again, or would that be kind of pointless?

 

Consequences of one game session get carried over to the next game session, often in a campaign setting.  The board is marked up and stickers get applied to it, one card is selected and discarded, certain stats or bonuses are carried over on player sheets.  There's often content that's in sealed pouches that are not revealed until certain conditions or a number of playthroughs have been achieved.

 

(RISK Legacy even had one sealed envelope that was labeled, "Do not open. Ever.")

[Knight of the Dinner Table]

I am not a big fan of putting stickers on the board and making permanent changes to game components. But ...

- it seems possible with some record keeping to avoid that

- there is a print and play file on BGG that enables you to reset the game (though I have not looked closely at it).

 

And: There is so much content in the game that I doubt I want to restart the campaign very often ... (ok, different play groups might be a reason).

[Dan d'Lyon]

I've heard that another company will be making removable "stickers" so you won't have to make permanent changes.  That could be a good solution.

[Jeneki]

Wouldn't putting stickers on cards make it difficult to shuffle?  Or do these cards not get shuffled.

[John Fiala]

Just now, Jeneki said:

Wouldn't putting stickers on cards make it difficult to shuffle?  Or do these cards not get shuffled.

 

I don't think stickers get applied to cards, but I could be wrong.

[Jeneki]

Ah ok, sorry there was a post on the first page that made it sound like stickers going on cards.

 

[John Fiala]

5 minutes ago, Jeneki said:

Ah ok, sorry there was a post on the first page that made it sound like stickers going on cards.

 

 

You're right, it does.  My understanding is that cards get replaced to improve characters, not removed, but I haven't played the game yet.

[Knight of the Dinner Table]

The cards in your deck are abilities. By donating gold to the local temple you can improve those abilities - i.e. put stickers on them. But those decks do not get shuffled.

[ced1106]

Look at the Pandemic: Legacy forum on BGG for a better idea of how a legacy game can play.

 

The BGG Gloomhaven file section has a map you can use to replace the game map and stickers. A third party sells reusable stickers. You can also photocopy the map and draw on the copy.

 

The cards have Enhancement stickers, but you can use sleeves to protect the cards. I guess you could photocopy the stickers and glue them onto the sleeves or something.

 

GH is more of a campaign game, where you unlock scenarios that you only see when the game tells you to. 

[CorallineAlgae]

I've wanted to get a campaign style dungeon crawl board game for years. I was planing to get Descent, but it looks like this may be a better choice. I'm in!

[ced1106]

Descent's a dice-chucker. Roll dice, convert icons to hits, try to get more hits than your opponent has shields. You should have at least one dice-chucking dungeoncrawl, but there are so many to choose from (including roleplaying games that can be used for miniature combat) that you'll end up with one eventually. GH uses hexes and standees, so you can use the components with Song of Blade and Heroes, GURPS Lite and Fantasy, Savage Worlds (including its Showdown miniature rules), etc. Most of these rules are free or inexpensive. PM me if you'd like to know more.

[CashWiley]

Here's what a friend on another board said on the legacy thing:

 

There are legacy elements, but it is very easy to ignore most of them if you want, or work around them. I'll go through the list.

1) There's a board that you put stickers on to permanently track your campaign progress. What scenarios you've unlocked, certain global achievements, the prosperity level of the town, etc. But it's easy to ignore this entirely. You literally only open this up in between games. Personally, I like the way it looks as you slowly unlock the world, and it's a nice visceral record of your adventures, but we've been tracking everything in a spreadsheet anyway, which is arguably more useful. Also, there's apparently a third party set of "resettable" stickers that just peel right of again if you want to do things that way. Haven't used them, so can't comment, but here they are [redacted, see following post]

2) There's a road and city event deck that changes as you play the game. Some of those are "destroyed", but you can just toss them out of the way instead and that solves that problem. Everything is numbered, so you just need to find cards 1-30 to reset back to the vanilla version of the game.

3) You theoretically start with 6 of the 17 characters and slowly unlock the remaining ones over time via personal quests. The "advanced" characters are in sealed envelopes, but you can either just ignore this entire concept and play with everything unlocked from the start, or just reset it by retaping the sealed envelopes (or just never breaking the seal and instead opening the envelopes from the bottom). There's also a sealed town records book that you're only meant to open once you've finished the personal quest of one of the characters.

4) The only thing that's actually difficult to reset is enhancements. At a certain point through the campaign you unlock the ability to "enhance" your ability cards for every member of that class. These are represented by stickers you permanently place on the card improving some aspect of them. You could theoretically track this on paper, but considering these are things actually used during the game, that would probably add a certain amount of irksome tedium and note keeping. Best option here if you're desperate to reset entirely is that third party sticker set I linked above, but another mitigating factor is that enhancements are really, really expensive. This will probably change as we move into the end game, but my groups haven't enhanced at all, because by the time you've got enough money to do so and have gotten a hang of the playstyle and know what cards you'd most want to enhance, that character is probably pretty close to retiring anyway, and we're always more interested in creating a new character of the unlocked class than starting a new one of the same class to take advantage of any purchased enhancements. You could probably ignore this mechanic entirely without breaking the game.

Everyone's got their own threshold for this sort of thing, and peronally I'm just buying a second copy of this to stick in a closet until my daughter might be old enough to want to play with me down the line, but if I were starting fresh with the intent to reset a single copy, I'd just not use the fold out "campaign status" map at all, not destroy cards, but not worry about trying to work around the enhancement system. It would mean that characters in subsequent games might start a little bit more powerful if the previous groups enhanced their cards, but the game has difficulty levels, so you could still tune it so that it's balanced.

[CashWiley]

Here's a video of the vinyl stickers, with retail info in the description.

 

 

[Talae]

Thanks, Cash!