Board Game (News) With Friends: Ultimate Werewolf Legacy

This week, Bezier Games announced that Ultimate Werewolf Legacy, a collaboration between game designer Ted Alspach and man-who-makes-you-play-the-same-game-12-times Rob Daviau, would be available at GenCon 2018. We ask, why?

For those of you unaware, Legacy games are a development of recent years, where when you play, the board changes - you write on the board, you add stickers, destroy components, open boxes with new components when you meet certain conditions, etc. leaving you with a set of the game that’s completely unique. It was a hit with 2011′s Risk Legacy, based on the classic Parker Brothers game Risk, and later with Pandemic Legacy, one of the greatest board games ever made, both with Rob Daviau as a contributing designer. However since then this concept has been shoved everywhere by everyone with access to a printer and some sealed envelopes without much regard for whether it belongs, or added to mediocre titles to hide the lack of gameplay behind the dopamine hit of opening boxes of mystery components.

When we saw the announcement of Ultimate Werewolf Legacy, we thought it was a joke. They couldn’t possibly be making us play Werewolf fifteen times with the same people, could they? Of all the games to make a Legacy version of, a simple party game like Werewolf seems like a baffling choice. We await being proven wrong, of course, we haven’t played the thing yet, but our expectation is that this is the point at which Legacy games have reached the point of self-parody.