#2:You have exactly 12 months to play one of the year's best board games

abc news - #2:You have exactly 12 months to play one of the year's best board games


The hobby games market has always been a world that creeps forward through subtlety and the clever application of themes. "Paradigm shift" isn't really a term that's used very often. The reasons seem obvious;
dice with numbers on them aren't patented, and neither are decks of cards (although tapping cards sort of is).

Nevertheless, every so often there are games that cast a long shadow. The last time something big happened in the tabletop world, something that could even closely approximate a paradigm shift, was the release of
Risk: Legacy in 2011. Rob Daviau, a tabletop designer who has made more and better Risk variants than practically anyone else, got a crazy idea: What if the game board, as well as the factions at the table, changed with each playthrough of the game?

The result was a board game that becomes uniquely your own, one that grows along with its players, bonding them together to tell an epic, collaborative story. For that reason, Risk: Legacy is a masterpiece that ranks among my most-recommended tabletop games of all time.

Since Risk: Legacy was released, Daviau left Hasbro and went indie. He's teamed up with

Matt Leacock, the designer of another one of the best board games in recent history,

Pandemic, to create Pandemic: Legacy

.

I put it on the table earlier this week, and was simply blown away.

There's a big caveat to the rest of this story, so I'm going to put it in bold right here:

What follows may spoil the opening rounds of this game for you. If you've played

Pandemic and love it already, just stop reading and go buy

Pandemic: Legacy right now.

If you don't care so much about mild spoilers, or if you've played Risk: Legacy

 more than a few times already, then this article is for you.