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There's a common joke made about Monopoly that it destroys lives. The massively popular love-letter to capitalist greed has become notorious for its ability to ruin friendships, end relationships, and shatter family-ties like brittle glass. Whether Monopoly truly is a cardboard home-wrecker is up for debate, but what is certain is that, whatever damage Monopoly does or doesn't do, when the game is over and the emotional smoke has cleared, the board and pieces go back into the box unchanged.But you can't shelve life. You can't fold everything neatly away, or place memories in little plastic bags and fit them into the appropriately moulded inserts. Everything that happens to you stays with you, and that extends to playing a game like Monopoly. When you next work up the courage to unfold that time-bomb of a board, it might not have changed, but you will have. You'll know your dad will try to buy all of the train stations, and that your mum always builds a hotel on Old Kent Road. So you'll shift your strategy to counter those tendencies, and your family will change their tactics to counter yours.
It was a similar observation, only about Cluedo, that led boardgame designer Rob Daviau to have an idea - what if the game changed along with the player's experience of it? "In a brainstorm for Cluedo we were talking, and I made the comment of 'I dunno why they keep inviting these people to dinner, they're all mass murderers,' Daviau says. "And it was this moment where I went 'Oh yeah!' The game kind of starts over like the movie groundhog day. But the players don't start over." This idea has resulted in what is undoubtedly the most radical board gaming innovation of recent years, that of Legacy gaming. Thus far Daviau has explored the idea in two stellar games, Risk Legacy and Pandemic Legacy, and he's currently working on a third, Seafall.
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