Risk Legacy: A Review

Let's get a few things out of the way, before I start roasting this game. Cause yes, I am about to hit it where it lives, as hard as I can.

I did enjoy myself.

I AM A TERRIBLE RISK PLAYER. NORMAL RISK AND I DO NOT GET ALONG.

This was my first Legacy game, ever. So I've no idea what this experience will do to my understanding of future Legacy games. I may look back on this more kindly in the future. We'll see.

It's important to know these things, because I am about to drop about a ton of bricks on this game. Yeah, I get the novelty of "adding things to the board" started here and we're all still living in the environment that the designer built (hopefully that ends with Oath) , but Risk Legacy is not a good narrative game.

 "Ok, wise-ass", someone who likes this game will say, "Define narrative!"

OK, sure.

A narrative is a sequence of events that each end with the statement "But" and/or "Therefore". Patrick Wilhem's amazing video boils it down and he's a quality dude to begin with, so if you wanna watch that and then get back to this rant/review I'd be more than happy to recommend it.

Yes, right now if you wish.

Back?

Cool.

So, by way of example, we'll take the Spider-Man origin story: Peter Parker is a cruelly abused nerd BUT he gets spider-powers THEREFORE he uses them for his own personal gain BUT his uncle is killed THEREFORE he chases down the sonabitch BUT discovers it's a dude he'd let get away with a crime THEREFORE Peter Parker realizes that he can never look away, never again THEREFORE Peter resolves to put himself in situations where he can't look away. That origin story is so good, on a structural level, that Spider-Man remains Marvel's best character, hands down.

Of course I'm objective about that. DUH.

The really heartbreaking part about Risk Legacy is that it actually manages to nail a narrative at the beginning. Stickers are flying, card bits are going into the trash, and there's so many But and Therefore statements happening because of the Legacy elements. Cities! Ooh! I can begin to muck with those! Wait, Ammo Shortage makes it harder to defend? CRAP! What now? What some think of as an addiction to just opening boxes is, I think, a reaction to powerful statements that fundamentally change everyone's relationship to the board state.

And for the first... ten or so sessions?

Maybe eleven?   

I was totally there, is the point.

So was my group. We would walk away from each game going "I have no freaking idea how we're going to deal with this now". We had been thrown back into the unknown, with a system that we had enough of an idea about to manipulate, but with elements that we could have some illusion of control over. And we would just blow up our group chat, every week, trying to figure out what we were going to do next.

Now, to be fair, a lot of real-world things happened in these last few sessions. But that's just not true anymore. The Legacy statements had mostly dried up, and I was left with a very, very unfortunate truth: Risk is still a bad game, nostalgia be damned. The same problems that I've always had with the game, namely how it seems to defy any and all attempts at actual strategy beyond slowly turtling along and for God's sake grab Australia had not vanished, but instead had become magnified. Risk's mechanics do not, natively, provide for But and Therefore statements, not in a way that respects player agency. The mechanics of battling would work out just fine if that was just one part of a holistic picture, where the wild and random nature of the dice fit into a larger mechanical picture. The Legacy mechanics provide for a fun and engaging distraction from Risk's battle mechanics, but there is nothing in the game that further engages with the wild nature of Risk's battling mechanics. Nothing. These additional mechanics are never developed further.

No, the stupid Event deck does not count. That thing was made for everyone's pain. Even when I benefited from it I found it dumb.

I can totally see enjoying this game for eight to ten sessions. There's a lot that gets unlocked, which keeps changing the board and the pace of the game, deepening it out and allowing you to take slightly different tacks. But the lack of depth on the Legacy mechanics, as well as the slowing of the drip of gaining new stuff, makes the end-game a ridiculous slog. If you don't mind Risk to begin with I can't recommend the game highly enough, because this game just takes that engine and tacks a few things on. But for folks like myself, who routinely considers burning his own dice?

Play eight to ten sessions and get out. You may not even last that long.