Rising to Average

Legacy games have become quite the fashion in my circle of gamers. Not long ago, we played through (and quite enjoyed) Charterstone. Since then, a subset of that group has played the new game, The Rise of Queensdale.

This comes from Inka and Markus Brand, the designers behind the Exit game series and many others. Most relevant to this endeavor, they're the designers of Village, a great worker-placement game with clever, thought-provoking systems. I bought The Rise of Queensdale, enthusiastically hoping this duo could bring some of that Village cleverness to a competitive legacy game.

Indeed, there are many neat ideas in the game. It's dice driven, giving each player their own set of 5 customizable dice. A key part of the legacy experience is buying new stickers between each game, which are affixed to faces of your dice to improve their potential. Legacy games seem like a good place to use dice, as the multiple plays afford ample opportunity for fickle streaks of luck to smooth out to "normal," allowing each player to compete. Plus there's an undeniable, visceral thrill in covering up an "old and busted" die face with some "new hotness."

The game also has some strong ideas on catch-up mechanics. It works hard to keep players even over the course of multiple games, with several ways of rubber-banding a trailing player back up into striking distance of the pack. It's arguably a bit too transparent in this, but I'd choose that over a competitive legacy system that didn't have enough ways to keep the all the players in contention for ultimate victory at the end of the campaign. (Particularly this system, which can require 20 games or more.)

But The Rise of Queensdale does have a few key shortcomings. I just hinted at the biggest one, the variable number of games it can take to complete the campaign. Really, it's the scoring system that results in this. The game has 9 "epochs," each indicating a particular (escalating) target score to win a game. In epoch 1, for example, you need just 10 points to win a game; epoch 9 requires 70. As the campaign unspools, different players will be in different epochs during the same game -- I might need to reach the 16 point victory condition of epoch 2, while two other players are trying for the epoch 3 victory condition of 22 points and the trailing player needs only the 10 points of epoch 1.

The varying length of the campaign happens because multiple players can achieve their own victory conditions (advancing to the next epoch) in each game. At one extreme, it's theoretically possible (but unlikely) for one player to just win every time the game is played; they would complete epoch 9 at the end of game 9, resulting in a 9-game campaign. At the other extreme, in a four-player campaign, each player could win by themselves and each claw their separate ways to epoch 8 before someone finally won it all -- that would take 33 games. Reality will settle somewhere in between as multiple players advance epochs at the same time. (Our four-player campaign took 19 games.)

The problem is that the game comes with 33 games' worth of content (or nearly that). If you shorten the experience by having too many players "advance together," you simply don't get to experience some portion of that content. I don't want to get too specific here and spoil anything for people who might play, but suffice it to say that my group wound up skipping about 8-10 possible random scenarios.

We looked at those skipped scenarios once we'd completed the whole campaign, and some of them sounded really cool. By random luck, the scenarios we'd played seemed quite boring by comparison. We "short-circuited" multiple opportunities to add components to the game and/or modify components to a degree that major strategic shifts would have been required of us. I'm not talking about situations where we could have "turned left instead of right"; The Rise of Queensdale has those kinds of scenarios too -- governed by player choice -- and they are intriguing. This is that players can simply not experience any form of a big chunk of the story content of the campaign, a design decision I'd understand in the context of a traditionally resettable, replayable game, but that I find confounding in a legacy experience that nearly all players will experience just once.

There's also a frustrating system for determining who goes first each game. It starts off reasonably enough in theory, giving the first turn to the player who's "farthest behind" -- the one with the lowest epoch goal. But this is often a tie, and you then resort to a tiebreaker that gives priority to the player who has more decorative features on the buildings they've constructed during the campaign. You pay more for these features, so you're essentially buying the right to win the tiebreaker. If you make a priority of pursuing this, you will in all likelihood keep the tiebreak win for the entire campaign. If multiple players pursue this tiebreaker, they're likely engaging in a fight for second place or worse, squabbling over the scraps at the table and dragging each other down.

What can result (and what happened in our campaign) is that if one player is regularly among the last to complete any given epoch, that player will continue to go first in every game. And because players always sit in the same order, it follows also that the same person is always going last. That was me, in I believe 15 of the 19 games we played, and it was quite frustrating. Other approaches to choosing a start player were available: the game comes with a die that's rarely used, and could have determined a random start player; there's also a first player marker that easily could be stored in a player's personal game components, and it could have just perpetually passed clockwise even across two playthroughs.

There are some good aspects to The Rise of Queensdale. Perhaps most important of all, it gets right pace of play and length of game. Individual turns are quite speedy (keeping everyone in even a 4-player game engaged). Each game itself takes around 45 minutes on average (so you can easily play more than once per session, if you're so inclined). But a lot of what the game is exploring was, I think, explored better in Charterstone -- which can actually accommodate more players (and, with 5 at least, does so quite well).

Overall, I'd give The Rise of Queensdale a B-. It's for people who liked Charterstone and want to scratch that itch with something different. Most other Euro gamers would probably better enjoy 20-or-so plays of some other worker placement game.