Risk Legacy - Review After 15 Plays

This review contains some *SPOILERS* for a Risk Legacy, so if you're concerned about finding out some of the "secrets" that this game has in store for players who slog through to the end of its life, stop reading now.  Just so you don't feel like you wasted your time coming here, here is the absolutely radical cover to the NES game JACKAL.

Risk Legacy wishes it were this cool.

Okay, so here's the short version of what Risk Legacy is all about. It's basically Risk, except that there are unique factions with different powers, persistent changes to the board that PERMANENTLY mark up the board and carry over from game to game, and the win condition is not dependent on eliminating all the other players.  The game has a life span of 15 plays, after which the overall winner is decided.  That all sounds kind of awesome, and if you're not bothered by the idea of marking up your board then Risk Legacy might be appealing to you.  Unfortunately, the appeal is only skin deep. Once you start getting to the heart of this game you'll realize it is an unbalanced mess that's a chore to play. It won't really sink in the first 3-4 times you play, either, it'll only be once you've hit game 9 or 10 that you realize you're dreading the idea of playing another 5 or 6 rounds of this game to get to the requisite 15 games required to "finish" it.

I'll start by listing a few good things about Risk Legacy. I like that there are 5 unique factions to start with, and another 2 that get added when special conditions are met in game, such as the Mutant faction which is available starting when 3 nuclear missiles are used to modify the same combat roll.  It's nice that you don't have to eliminate every player to win, and that each game the board gets changed. Small and large cities are added, as well as bunkers, mercenary encampments, ammo shortages and other special territory modifiers. These things change the dynamic of the game and keep things fresh.  It's rad that you draft factions, starting locations, turn order, starting armies, and starting resource cards. Forcing players to choose whether they want their favorite faction or their favorite starting territory makes for interesting and varied setups.  The game has a lot going for it, unfortunately all these cool ideas wind up getting wrecked by terrible balance issues, and most of the best ideas are half-baked in execution. 

So what's so bad about it? For starters, the game makes no attempt at being balanced. Each of the 5 starting factions gets assigned a unique faction power that'll stick with them throughout the course of the game's life, selected by the player who chooses the faction.  Some of these powers are great, like Khan Industry's power that gives them a free unit at their HQ every turn.  Other powers are not so great, like the Saharan Republic's power to maneuver armies between two non linked friendly territories.    Their other potential power, an incredibly useful one which allows them to maneuver before conquering territories, is thrown away forever if you don't pick it during the first game.  One of these powers is almost always useful, while they other one is almost never useful. In our game, the Saharan republic got the awful power, so you can bet that they were always the last faction drafted in every game after the first. Khan's power turned out to be the best, as was evidenced by the Khan player winning a third of the total games played.

The win condition in Risk Legacy is to collect 4 red stars. You get one for controlling your HQ, and then one more for each additional HQ you control. You can also trade in 4 territory cards at the start of your turn for a red card. You draw territory cards from a shifting track of 4 each time you conquer a territory. Basically you can draw a card from the track if you control the territory it corresponds to, or just draw a vanilla "coin card" and then advance the track by discarding the last card on it and adding a new one to the front. You'll trade these territory and coin cards in for additional armies, and in standard risk fashion, the game is often won on the turn when somebody trades in a stack of cards for a ton of armies that they sweep the board with.  You can also get red mission stars by completing special missions, such as controlling seven islands at once or conquering a ton of territories in one turn, but most of these missions are ridiculously difficult to complete, and wind up just sitting in the mission area for the whole game. 

Risk Legacy also does its best to reward the winning-est player in your group, which is just ass-backwards. For example, if you win the game you can place a major city which only YOU can start with in subsequent games, you also get an additional missile that you can use to turn a combat roll into a 6 for each game you win. Random events that are triggered by territory cards coming onto the territory track also mostly help out players who are already winning. You have the highest population by controlling cities? There's an event you can benefit from that'll give you extra troops.  I can't comprehend why anyone would design a "random" event that awards the player who is already winning the game.  It might as well just say, "you win the game, guy who is already winning." 

By the end of our 15 plays, the top player had two capital cities right next to each other, one of which in was in the best continent in the game (South America). If he got Khan Industry and started in one of his capitals, you could be sure that he was probably just going to win the game. The only thing that could stop him was actually tons of kingmaker shenanigans, which the game has no shortage of.  In fact, by the final few games,the first player who came within striking distance of victory would often be met by a slew of missile fire from other players who didn't want the game to end.  They would modify the defender's dice rolls to sixes using missiles, and since the attacker loses on ties, the attacker could be guaranteed to need one extra troop for each available missile between all players during the proposed victory turn.  What often happened was that you'd want to be the second place player for the majority of the game, that way you could sweep up the win after the failed first place player's attempt. The saddest thing is that the players who are firing missiles to prevent the game from ending are actually playing CORRECTLY if they want to have the best chance to win.  How does it get to be that the best way to use your missiles is not to win the game on your turn, but to prevent somebody else from winning on their turn?  How does that make any sense?  

All of this just adds up to Risk Legacy being an unintuitive mess. I hate it when a game wants you to be second place for most of it, or when it rewards the leading player by making it easier for them to win, or even when you can have a game end before your third turn because of bizarre kingmaker nonsense. This isn't even  counting the regular problems with Risk, most of which involve the game's horrible combat system which basically boils down to having twice as many troops as the defender and then hoping that they roll poorly. It's definitely better with friends, but that's the best thing you can say about Risk Legacy: it's better with friends.  Sticking sewing needles under your fingernails is better with friends too, though, so just keep that in mind next time you're deciding whether your money is best spent at the local game store on Risk Legacy or at Joann's Fabrics.