by SlyMathMan
I don’t play many legacy games. Prior to TTR Legacy I have only played the first Clank! Legacy game. My parents are big fans of TTR and I figured “Oh well we have to play the legacy version.” We finished TTR Legacy in its entirety, and it took more than a year to do so.I will keep this review as spoiler free as possible. If you want to go in completely fresh, be warned that there are some rules I will have to discuss or hint at. There is a small spoiler section near the bottom that will be blocked out. First I’d like to acquaint everyone with my experience with both legacy and TTR games.
When it comes to TTR, my parents and I have played a crazy amount of it. We have played the Europe version over 150 times, and the original version over 100 times. We played the Nordic version but disliked the odd locomotive rules that one has. TTR is definitely our most played game together though and we love it.
The only other legacy game I have played is Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Inc., which I played with my wife. It was our first foray into the Clank! world. To make a long story short, we love Clank! and subsequently purchased the Catacombs version, but the legacy part we weren’t big on. There could be insanely long turns due to reading the book, and putting stickers down, etc. My wife and I always ended up feeling egh by the time we finished a game. Clank! Legacy could also feel like it should have been cooperative rather than competitive due to the story content. I think the story content while good, got in the way of us being competitive in Clank! Legacy.
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The Review
My parents and I loved the Legacy version of TTR. There are definitely some caveats though, and some games were more fun than others. I’ll explain why below.
If you haven’t played TTR and you are considering the Legacy version as a start off point, let me tell you right now, don’t. Do yourself a favour and definitely give TTR a play. It may or may not be for you, but regardless, I would only recommend this experience for people who enjoy TTR. And this game is an experience; a good one, but a deeper one than the regular game.
What follows are not really spoilers because you are going to figure all this out when opening the box. There are 12 games in the campaign. At the beginning you start with a very small map (with less trains to work with), which makes the games super short and punchy (under 30 minutes). The board gets bigger in each game, to the point where a single game could last over 2 hours (as it did for us). To compare, the regular TTR lasts about 1 hour for my family.
Each time you add on a section to the map, you add in a new rule. Admittedly some of these rules are better than others. They are all unique, and most of them my parents loved; so did I. Where I think the game had a bit of a problem is that at a certain point, about 8 games in, I had about 4-5 or so extra rules that I had to re-explain to my parents each time we played. Part of this is because we had months of time between some of our games.
All these rules can be a lot to keep track of, especially for a family weight game. The Legacy version becomes more of a strategy game on account of all these extra things you have to consider as you play. Rather than a game of, “I need to get those cards to complete these tickets, and get routes before my competitors,” it’s more of the same thing, plus “…and I want to play certain cards, or go on certain routes, or get that bonus thing, or avoid THAT! and more stuff.” I play and love some heavier games (such as Ark Nova, Concordia), and TTR Legacy had my head in a bit of a knot sometimes with all the things I had to keep track of. It became a little too much for my parents at times.
Most of the extra rules are awesome though. When the games would finish we would talk about how much we enjoyed particular rules. Minor spoiler: [o]There are some rules with stickers and scratch off things which we also really enjoyed.[/o]
There are also rules we didn’t enjoy. We disliked rules that could mess with you in some way. We enjoy positive play in my family. Some rules would semi-randomly negatively affect players. The extra rules are not all permanent though, and we did our best to try and remove these as quickly as possible within the rules. There is one rule that we got early on, and simply stopped using several games in. To clarify, I don’t mean there was a rule that benefitted one player and the other players missed out, I mean there was a rule that negatively affected 1 or 2 players semi-randomly.
It can be easy to mess up the rules due to their complexity and the number of them, and there were times where we would say “Hey, I messed up, can I take that back,” and because it’s a family game and it’s all about having fun we would usually say yeah you can do that as long as it made sense. If for example it was a situational thing where they could have done something but we didn’t know if they could do it at the time several turns ago then we would say no.
A rule you start with is the event deck, where several times throughout the game you can pull an event that will temporarily change the rules to the game, or give a possible random bonus to particular players. These are great and relatively simple to implement. I wanted to see more of the events. There are some events though that were more negative that we disliked. But you do get the option to get rid of events at particular parts of the campaign, so we did our best to remove the ones we disliked when possible.
One small thing I will mention is that there is a story in the campaign, but it’s barely there. This Legacy game is not about the story. The story doesn’t need to be important for this game though.
Our experience of the game was something like this: Games 1-6: Wow, this is so cool! This is awesome!
Games 7-9: This game is getting super long, and my god are there a lot of rules, but it’s still super cool. I do wish there were less complicated rules to keep track of.
Games 10-12: Alright, most of the rules we disliked are gone now, and the map is basically full. Oh, and there’s even more cool stuff! The rules they add in the last couple games are just delightful in our opinion.
After campaign end, we all really enjoyed TTR Legacy. If another Legacy version is released, I’ll definitely have a conversation with my parents about “Do we want to do this all over again?” My parents will likely say yes if so. After campaign end it does provide you with a playable game, but without the Legacy elements; I can see us possibly playing it again.
I personally far preferred TTR Legacy over Clank! Legacy. TTR Legacy better paced due to faster turns. Turns are slower in TTR Legacy (vs original TTR) because of having to do various extra activities due to additional rules. A turn never lasts more than a minute though. In Clank! Legacy there were some turns that could take upwards of several minutes in our games.
I think TTR Legacy gets an unfair judgement by some of the community. Many gamers say “It doesn’t add much new to the formula, there isn’t a spectacular story, and they just add a bunch of extra rules to TTR as you play.” What some people forget is how good a game TTR really is. The original TTR should be in the BGG top 100 in my opinion.
What I think makes TTR great is the following:
-the game has super short turns
-the rules are super approachable and easy to learn for families
-there is so much satisfaction to completing tickets by putting trains on a track
-the great tension that occurs when considering your next turn, wondering if you should put that route down, or pick up that train card you need, or go for tickets
Because TTR is such a great game, adding fun dynamic rules to the game over a campaign is exactly what my parents and I wanted from this. It’s just more TTR. And yeah it’s not breaking the mold. But it’s TTR for darned sake, one of the top selling games in the last 30 years. I just want to pick up train cards, build routes, complete tickets, and have some fun interactive elements.
If you love TTR and you have a group ready to take things to the next level, this is a non-miss. If you aren’t as big on TTR, this isn’t for you. If you like the dynamic of TTR, but you love legacy games, this is worth considering for sure. The rules complexity of the Legacy version might make it difficult for some though, and I don’t recommend it for kids.
Short spoiler section involving comparison about final scoring, and comparing it to Clank! Legacy’s method of final scoring:
[o]One thing I want to add about comparing the Clank! vs TTR Legacy is the following: TTR Legacy did the final campaign winner scoring much better than Clank! Legacy. Without getting into too many details, I had a very good idea throughout the entire game how I felt TTR Legacy should score upon campaign completion, and that is exactly what it did. Clank! Legacy on the other hand felt like a slap in the face. “Wait… you get a point for that in final campaign scoring? WHY!??” If it’s not clear how you are supposed to win the whole campaign I feel it’s a mistake. Anyways, what I mean to say is, good job TTR Legacy for not trying to do anything fancy and silly on the final campaign scoring.[/o]