Game Idea A Week: Legacy Cards

Week Eight (29/11/2009)

The Idea for this week is a card game where players are rulers of the world and they need to build legacy cards to be remembered by.

Platform:

Cards

Genre:

Strategy

Why it needs to be made:

Some card games can be very complex to learn and take a long period of time per game. This game has a fixed number of rounds and a simple mechanic that means it can be played in shorter period of time than some card and board games.

Description:

The aim of the game is to build your Legacy using monuments, parades and banks. Players continue to build their Legacies until someone has built 5. More points are awarded if the built Legacies are all of the same type.

There are two card packs that operate together. One card pack contains the Legacies the player can build, the other pack contains the resources needed to build Legacies. Each Legacy is built using three resources (resources are: gold, bricks and subjects/people). The Legacies are monuments, parades and banks. Players can also use three resources to destroy someone's Legacy according to the following rules: a billboard destroys a monument; a riot destroys a parade; a thief destroys a bank. There are three special card types in the Legacy pack which can be used for free: swap (swap a built Legacy for someone else's built Legacy), protect (protects your cards from destruction) and destroy (destroys a protect card OR up to two Legacies).

Why it will be a compelling game:

This game allows people to pretend that they can have banks, parades and monuments in their honour, as well as letting people destroy other people's legacies. The core rules of the game can be learnt relatively quickly, but then to master the game players need to determine the best strategy for the people they are playing with. Playing with different players, or remembering how other players destroyed your buildings will result in a compelling social interaction.

Other thoughts:

This game has been fully implemented and playtesting has begun. Check out the non-digital games page and the Legacy specific page to download a print 'n' play version of this game that contains all the cards and the rules in PDF format.