This was going to be a nice little article about games I had the pleasure of playing during the Lunar New Year, but it has instead changed into a musing on game campaigns – legacy and traditional – and discussing:

why legacy campaigns are the way they are
why traditional campaigns cannot be legacy campaigns
why neither campaign type is a blight on the hobby and there’s more than enough room for both
and why it is so important – as a consumer of board games – to understand what you’re getting into with either type of campaign.

So now let’s talk in detail.

Conflating Legacy and Traditional Campaigns

Currently I’ve finished my fourth game of my Legacy of Yu (Shem Phillips) campaign, and I enjoy it greatly, and expect to finish out my campaign. And to repeat this campaign in the future.

And it shocked me, frankly, to find some people lambasting Legacy of Yu for having a lousy campaign and being a boring game with a deceptive premise.

Because… I don’t know if you noticed… it’s a game about building canals. If you’re not here for building canals why are you playing this game and then being upset that it’s about, well, building canals, like it says on the back and on all the marketing copy?

Then I realized that people were interpreting “campaign” as meaning “legacy campaign” because they assumed that “Legacy” in the title meant a legacy campaign – as opposed to “legacy” as in “left a legacy behind them” – despite the game never promising that the campaign was a legacy campaign.

And then I remembered the “legacy” campaigns that were promised on the back of the box and in marketing copy for Ticket to Ride Legacy as well as at least the first editions of the Tuscany expansion for Viticulture – and how neither of these “legacy campaigns” were truly legacy, and in a more meaningful way than “were boring” (because they aren’t boring but they aren’t legacy).

And that’s when I decided that enough is enough. We need to talk about what a legacy campaign actually is, because it’s definitely not what every game campaign is, nor is it a replacement for traditional campaigns.

I think game publishers have helped with conflating both types of campaigns with each other, resulting in confusion and mismatched expectations for gamers, and even some really expensive buys that were never going to give gamers who expected one thing – a legacy experience – what they actually wanted.

Note, even though I know people will quote the above parts out of context – I love Ticket to Ride and Viticulture, and I have nothing against the designers or even the publishing companies. Sometimes we make decisions and we have no idea what the ripple effects of a decision that seems innocuous may end up being, for we’re all human, not omnipotent.

What Makes a Campaign Legacy?

In both types of campaigns, you have a game state that passes on and changes from game to game in a particular campaign. The game will change as you play, from adding new components and taking away old ones, to changing play loops, to sometimes more radical changes. Often – but not always – there’s a story involved.

Where legacy campaigns really differ from traditional ones are in two important aspects:

Legacy campaigns are destructive to game components by necessity, which is driven by the second aspect.
Legacy campaigns are expected to provide twists and turns that completely change what the game is.

The destructive nature of the legacy approach to campaigns may seem unnecessary and even wasteful, but it’s actually the most cost-effective way of providing the legacy-style experience.

In order to have a non-destructive legacy campaign where the game itself is radically changed into entirely different objectives and sometimes entirely different genres, multiple copies of entirely new copies of major components – including the entire game board – would need to be provided in the box. These copies would need to make allowances for multiple possible iterations, including changing the names and requirements for cards and tiles, nearly all of which are user-generated or even entirely user-decided.

Stickers and destructible components are actually the cheapest, most user-friendly, and most materially efficient way to implement a true legacy board game.

Why Isn’t a Traditional Campaign Legacy?

Traditional campaigns do not destroy or permanently modify their components – and as a result, they cannot provide the unexpected twists and turns in the way a legacy game can.

The closest I have seen a traditional campaign come to legacy in terms of radical changes would be the campaign of CGE’s Under Falling Skies (Tomáš Uhlíř) – and they do what I said a Legacy game would need to do to be non-destructive: they provide entire replacement boards. It’s thanks to Under Falling Skies’ modular nature from the start that made this quasi-legacy campaign experience even possible to do on a reasonable budget.

And even so? Under Falling Skies never radically changes the play loop, never rips away the underlying theme and genre, never creates an incompatible version of the game that cannot be played with all the original components as a simple expansion of the base game.

That alone means that Under Falling Skies’ campaign is still limited in the ways any traditional campaign is, and can never be as surprising and dynamic as a legacy campaign is (at least the first time).

What Makes a Campaign Good is Not Its Type But Its Heart

But does that mean Under Falling Skies fails as a campaign game?

NO. Under Falling Skies is an absolute achievement among campaign games of any type – and specifically traditional campaigns.

In many ways, the traditional campaign of Under Falling Skies has given me more satisfaction than various seasons of Pandemic Legacy, not least of which is – when I come to play a defend-earth-against-aliens game, or a solve-pandemic-crisis game… I did NOT come to play a REDACTED game.

This is a personal judgement – others may not find the Under Falling Skies campaign to be their thing – but you cannot accuse Under Falling Skies of being thoughtless about how the campaign was implemented.

When it comes to Legacy of Yu, the changes are not as radical as for Under Falling Skies – because Legacy of Yu’s components do not allow for that amount of change cheaply without absolute destruction – but what I can say is that they are well-balanced, they keep the game’s heart true to its core, and they tell a narrative.

The changes may not be radical enough for a particular gamer’s tastes – but by no means does this make Legacy of Yu a bad game or one where the designers were unimaginative or clueless. It just makes the game not for you.

Which is not, and never has been, the same as “universally bad.”

Forget Rubrics

As someone who used to review books and used to review games on a more consistent and sometimes professional basis, I have learned that rubrics – basically, rules for “what makes a thing good” – are bunk.

What makes a game good has never been about whether it satisfies some specific trend, has some specific set of mechanisms, or speaks to some or other theme.

What makes a game good is what makes any piece of art good – what is at the game’s heart? How well is that communicated? How much did the game provoke your engagement with it, and did that engagement feel valuable to you? Did it make you feel the highs of tension, or did it make you feel relaxed; did it make you laugh, did it make you think? Did you like these feelings or not?

Engagement is everything.

All else is noise.

Postscript

I think I will merge my Lunar New Year Week games with next month’s February summary, and do a Briefly review series for each Oniverse game I played. Because each one is its own microcosm of mechanisms and play style, as well as a cluster of expansions that usually add a lot to the base game.