Whilst the interest in the genre has waned, it could simply take the right name and the right approach to make legacy games popular again. But I don’t think that’s the case, because I don’t think legacy games are a fad.
One could argue that if the studio did put a legacy game out now, they would have already missed the boat on this particular fad. I’m actually astonished that Fantasy Flight hasn’t made a legacy game yet considering all the juicy intellectual property it has to hand, though it’s possible that its seemingly unwavering focus on expansions and living card games has kept the publisher busy. All of this is to say that the fervent hype for legacy games, one that had publishers rushing to make a legacy version of their own best-selling series, has very much died down in recent years.
Even the beloved Pandemic Legacy series hasn’t been entirely free of criticism, with its players giving a mixed reception to Season Two’s experimental approach to the classic Pandemic gameplay system. Machi Koro Legacy, Seafall and Charterstone are just some of the legacy games that have failed to attract much attention or have garnered criticism for a variety of reasons - whether that’s for gameplay reasons, such as Machi Koro Legacy, or for struggling to deliver on the storytelling potential of their campaign formatd. The fervent hype for legacy games has very much died down in recent years. But while titles such as Pandemic Legacy and Betrayal Legacy seemed to live up to the hype and deliver something truly great, a lot of other legacy games fell flat by comparison.
A board game where you physically destroy or permanently alter components? It wasn’t really like anything we’d seen before. When Risk Legacy and Pandemic Legacy: Season One - the first two big legacy board games - came out, it felt like the tabletop gaming world was enthused with excitement for this bold new style of game. The news that Fantasy Flight Games, the studio behind the Arkham Horror Files universe, is contemplating creating a legacy board game, got me thinking - legacy games haven’t quite been the cultural explosion for board games we thought they would be.