Betrayal Legacy is based on Betrayal at House on the Hill, a game from 2004 with many ardent supporters. Players wander into a spooky old house, gather a handful of creepy items, and are suddenly hit with a story-driven scenario inspired by the great horror tropes. One player turns against the others, who must band together to slay the vampire, defeat the mad scientist, stop the preparations for an evil ritual... whatever the story chosen at random for this particular playthrough throws at the group. The one betrayer is given a set of rules to define how they will win; the rest of the players read a different set of rules spelling out their conditions for victory.
I was never a big fan of Betrayal at House on the Hill. There are those who love it -- I mean really love it -- but I always found it too chaotic and too time-consuming to be as lightweight as it is. But this new incarnation, Betrayal Legacy, was so widely praised among board game enthusiasts that I was willing to give it a try. (Well... that, and it had been more than a decade since I'd played the original game -- long enough to forget exactly what it was I didn't like about it.) But I haven't really buried the lead here: I found Betrayal Legacy to be no better than the original game. If anything, in "forcing" me to play 14 games of it (the campaign's 13 prescribed scenarios, plus an introductory game), it was worse.
I've hinted at the flaws I felt about Betrayal at House on the Hill, but it's worth saying that they remain present in the Legacy version. For the first 1/4 to 1/3 of any game, you actually have no direction to follow. Players simply wander around at random on their turn, discovering new rooms in the mansion in the form of tiles that are laid out on the table. They might find baubles to carry, or have strange encounters that affect one of their game stats (usually for the worse), but there's no actual goal to pursue. For that, you have to wait until "the Haunt" is triggered, the moment at which a traitor is revealed and players are given the scenario that defines what's actually must be done to win the game.
The separation of scenario rules into one book for the Traitor and a different book for the other players is meant to inject mystery, but it always winds up causing more confusion than drama. Players have to be cagey around each other to preserve things that are ostensibly meant to surprise, but there's enough overlap between the two rules sets to deflate the mystery, and enough lack of clarity that still no one really knows what they're doing for a few turns.
As with the original Betrayal at House on the Hill, Betrayal Legacy includes several dozen scenarios -- enough to cover branching possibilities during the campaign, and also to support post-campaign play. Like the original, few of these scenarios seem sufficiently playtested and balanced. The vast majority of scenarios heavily favor one side or the other, with very few offering an experience that actually feels tense and capable of going either way. But then... it's possible that the feeling of imbalance is sometimes there for failure to understand the rules properly -- because many scenarios aren't sufficiently explicit. BoardGameGeek is loaded with questions covering nearly every scenario in the book, clarifying oversights and squishy language, acknowledging ways in which players "broke" certain games that later had to be revised, and generally "patching" the game as originally released.
The Legacy elements don't add nearly enough to the underlying Betrayal experience. There is a "meta-story" of sorts that unfolds over centuries as descendants of the same families return to the same creepy house. But the contours of that story aren't really revealed until more than half of the 13 games have been completed, and there's really not much more to it than "there's one big evil here responsible for it all."
The Legacy gameplay mechanics use a similarly soft touch. You sticker tiles where players die, with those deaths sometimes impacting a handful of cards in subsequent games. Players can mark certain items as family "heirlooms," which in theory imparts a bonus when the same player acquires them again in a subsequent game. In practice, however, the item deck is so large, and acquiring any one particular card so random an occurrence, that you almost never get the payoff. One or two other elements come into play later in the campaign, and with just a bit more frequency over multiple games. Still, the overall impact of the game's Legacy elements are that you wind up doing a great deal of bookkeeping for effects both infrequent and negligible.
I was ready to abandon the Betrayal Legacy campaign quite early on, but enough players in my group were still into it enough (at first) to get us past the halfway point. By then, we all sort of felt pot committed. In a virtual gaming suicide pact, we saw the whole campaign through to the end... and then promptly tossed the game in the trash, even though it supports post-campaign play. I can say with certainty that I'll never like a campaign game less and still actually finish that campaign.
In the end, Betrayal Legacy is as chaotic and disjointed an experience as playing Betrayal at House on the Hill 14 times. And yet, there are people out there who would gladly sign up for that. I truly don't understand what they're seeing in the game. For stronger gameplay mechanics that change over time -- from the same game designer, even -- look to Pandemic Legacy. For a more satisfying story that really does build throughout a Legacy campaign, I'll not-at-all-humbly suggest Clank! Legac: Acquisitions Incorporated.
Betrayal Legacy is, at best, a D in my book. (And only that high because, in something this random, you're bound to randomly find fun on occasion too. We did, in perhaps 2 of the 14 scenarios we played.) If your gaming tastes tend to align with mine, I strongly suggest you look elsewhere for your next Legacy game. But if you loved the original Betrayal at House on the Hill, or already own Betrayal Legacy and love it, don't let me harsh on your fun.
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