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Oh man, my mapping blog! I must have been crazy thinking I would post interesting stuff here when really I spent all my free time making stuff, like the map analyzer and helping MotM get off the ground and whatnot.
Anywho, I have a lot less free time than when I was mapping, but I have definitely been putting it to good use. I enjoy designing games as a hobby, and I think I really hit on something good with a board game I call Legacy. I started working on it in November and now I have a physical design and an online version that you can play for free.
I've done tons of in-person testing to bring the game to a pretty mature state. Now I'm ready to release this pig in the wild and I can think of no better public arena to debut a strategy game than TeamLiquid!
So what is Legacy?
Legacy is an abstract strategy game that you can play with any number of players. It works like this: there is a deck of 93 cards, one card for each number 1 through 90 and three special cards called journey cards.
Draw a card. Usually the card is a number, say 34. Every player then adds 34 to some part of his or her legacy, which I'll talk more about in a bit. Then you draw the next card, maybe its 89, and again every player uses the number 89. When you draw a journey card you just set it aside where everyone can see and draw another card. The journey cards set the pace of the game: when you draw the third journey the game is over, so you might not draw every numbered card in a single game. (For math nerds: no matter how many numbered cards there are, if you shuffle three journey cards into the deck you will probably draw about 2/3 of the numbered cards before the third journey.)
So what are you doing with these numbered cards? You add them to one of the three elements of your legacy, which are your garden, your opus and your empire. The three elements of your legacy have different structures and different scoring systems, and you add the three scores together to get your total legacy score. The ultimate goal of Legacy is to have the highest-scoring legacy when the third journey is drawn.
Here's an example game, just to give you a quick taste:
+ Show Spoiler +
This page has the full game rules but I'll give you the quick descriptions of the opus, garden and empire to try and hook you. 
Opus
Your opus kind of looks like musical notes: each new number gets added to the right-end and the numbers alternate "high" and then "low." The key feature of the opus is the 1's digit of the numbers you play in it. You add all the 1's digits in "high" position (so the 9's kick ass here) and you subtract all the 1's digits in "low" position (you want 10, 20, etc, down low). The opus is the only element where you can always play a number, so sometimes I make sub-par plays in the early game just to make sure I'm not forced to put a 39 in "low" position, for example.
Empire
You play numbers in the empire like a grid, with the restriction that adjacent numbers have to alternate between even and odd. Your objective here is to build a rectangle, like a wall, and the score of the empire is the width times the height of the rectangle. You can play safe and build a tiny rectangle, and then enlarge it if the game goes longer, or you can play risky and go for a huge perimeter that uses numbers efficiently. (For the math nerds again: square-ish rectangles score better than a skinny rectangle that uses the same amount of played numbers.) (For strategy nerds: skinny rectangles are easier to extend indefinitely and then suddenly close off when the end of the game draws near.)
Garden
Your garden looks like a tree. You play new numbers as if they branch off some number already in the garden, but the new number has to be smaller than the number it branches from, kind of like the branches of a tree that get smaller as they get farther from the trunk. The goal of the garden is to have as many leaves as possible, where a leaf is a number that has no other numbers branching from it.
So yeah, go read the full rules and/or start playing online! Then when you've played a couple of games and you get the hang of the scoring, come back to this next part if you are the competitive type, which is why I'm bringing this to TL in the first place.
How to compete with other Legacy players
Remember I said this is a strategy game for any number of players? If you get a physical copy you can play with any number of people you can cram into one place, of course, but what about online?
The online version lets you punch in a game number when it starts up. If you put in the same game number you will get the exact same deck shuffle, so I can play game number 12345 and you can play 12345 and we can directly compare our scores because we drew the same numbers in the same order. And before you ask, no I am not going to code up some explicit multiplayer or make some database backend for a simple reason: it is really easy to cheat. So as far as I'm concerned the game is for groups of people who trust each other to actually post the results of their first true play of a game number. And TL is literally the only place on the internet where I think you can find more than one person willing to do this!!
So let me end my public debut of Legacy with my own score for Game Number #12345
+ Show Spoiler [12345] +
I hope you enjoy my game!
EDIT: Let's establish a bit of Legacy netiquette: always put scores and game discussions in a spoiler tagged with the game number. I changed the spoiler tag above that's hiding my screen shot of game 12345 to follow this.
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wow! This is amazing! I like the tension between the different structures.
+ Show Spoiler [score on #12345] +
201
not as good as dimfish's
what about the 1 in 778596(i think) seeds that produce games with three journey cards at the start? 
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On May 24 2012 12:39 Namrufus wrote:wow! This is amazing! I like the tension between the different structures. ... what about the 1 in 778596(i think) seeds that produce games with three journey cards at the start?
Dude! Put your score in a spoiler! Other people can guess how long the game is before they play if they see your score. Even if you want to play honestly you can't "unsee!" 
I'm glad you enjoyed it, and yeah, there are some games where you could draw all three journeys BAM-BAM-BAM but I haven't had one yet in probably hundreds of games.
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I guess you just shuffle the deck and regame at that point. Or you can bitch about how none of your legacies were worth talking about! :D
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On May 24 2012 13:10 dimfish wrote:Show nested quote +On May 24 2012 12:39 Namrufus wrote:wow! This is amazing! I like the tension between the different structures. ... what about the 1 in 778596(i think) seeds that produce games with three journey cards at the start? Dude! Put your score in a spoiler! Other people can guess how long the game is before they play if they see your score. Even if you want to play honestly you can't "unsee!" I'm glad you enjoyed it, and yeah, there are some games where you could draw all three journeys BAM-BAM-BAM but I haven't had one yet in probably hundreds of games.
oops. sorry, I didn't think of that.
edit:
and on a tangent, thanks for making the sc2 map analyzer, I use it all the time still.
also, how would you feel if I made a small program (for myself only) to simulate legacy in order to test combinations and strategies and other stuff?
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On May 24 2012 13:12 Archas wrote:
I guess you just shuffle the deck and regame at that point. Or you can bitch about how none of your legacies were worth talking about! :D
Now that you've both got me thinking about it, I want to have a game where you draw one number, everyone labors furiously about what do with it, AND then draw three journeys.
On May 24 2012 13:18 Namrufus wrote:
and on a tangent, thanks for making the sc2 map analyzer, I use it all the time still.
that was also a labor of love
On May 24 2012 13:18 Namrufus wrote:
also, how would you feel if I made a small program (for myself only) to simulate legacy in order to test combinations and strategies and other stuff?
I don't mind if you do that or if you distribute it even!
I've put a lot of gamer-types on Legacy and I think the three elements have just the right interplay. For instance, the empire and garden didn't have the bonuses they have now, and they only caught up to the scoring potential of the opus if there were even MORE numbers. Basically, the opus's potential is steep then drops off, the empire can be exponential (this is all in terms of score as a function of the amount of played numbers) if you are willing to commit to a certain size, and the garden is actually linear. Anywho, I think between some of my own calculations, simulations and tons of playtesting that its at a good place, BUT you'll never know what people can do with a game until you release to a huge group of smart people.
So yeah, please hack away! I want to know if you can break this game!
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#12345:
Got: 32+159+41=232
Went for biggest garden and didn't care about opus and tree much, I guess it's a bit risky that way.
Imo best strategy probably is medium sized square garden + focus on tree. To me opus seems to be just a filling not a real score maker.
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LastWish, please put your score in a spoiler! I'll put something in the OP, I think we should always do that.
On May 24 2012 17:10 LastWish wrote:
Went for biggest garden and didn't care about opus and tree much, I guess it's a bit risky that way.
Imo best strategy probably is medium sized square garden + focus on tree. To me opus seems to be just a filling not a real score maker.
So by "garden" I think you mean empire (make a rectangle) and then "tree" is the garden (make a tree), and yes its risky to go for a big empire but it really depends on how you manage the risk whether you will be successful with that over many games, kind of like risky Starcraft play I suppose.
LEt's say you start your empire as an "L" shape, just one corner and two growing sides and you haven't even gotten the first journey yet. I'd say this is less risky than just saying "no matter what I'm going to build an 8-by-8" empire. And less risky yet: build a small rectangle and evaluate your situation: should I now leave the empire alone or is there probably enough time to extend the rectangle? If you keep extending and the game ends suddenly, you can always choose the biggest rectangle you completed.
Also, don't count the opus out! The opus gives you the quickest return for your investment. A "9-0-9-0-9" is 27 points for five numbers played which is a whopping 5.4 score-per-number-played. If we drew one or two journeys very early in the game I think I would concentrate on the opus.
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Oh, I'm going to be at Gamex/Strategicon this Saturday in LA. Drop me a line if you're going and want to meet up, I'll bring a copy of Legacy but I think there's also an open area where people set out their board games for anyone to play so there will be a lot to choose from.
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I like how it is deceptively simple. You took something basic, organizing numbers in patterns and made it strategic and complex. I don't imagine it as something I'd play repeatedly at one sitting, but a different and nice game to play between others. Kudos.
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On May 25 2012 05:47 DeMorcerf wrote:
I like how it is deceptively simple. You took something basic, organizing numbers in patterns and made it strategic and complex. I don't imagine it as something I'd play repeatedly at one sitting, but a different and nice game to play between others. Kudos.
Thanks! It took a lot of tinkering to find the right amount of depth while keeping it simple. I'll give you my secret: I tried to keep the entire rulebook, diagrams included, to one page. If you've tried to design your own games then I bet you know how wordy the rules for even simple systems can get.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/PGUnY.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/NzhF6.jpg)
