by daveola
Betrayal Legacy is actually a good game, but so much of it's potential is lost in a hacked together and poorly rules tested legacy.So much of the legacy is fake legacy.
For example, in many cases, if the traitor wins you change the deck a certain way.
And if the heroes win, then you change the deck in pretty much exactly the same way.
Many cards come out and the person who pulls them gets to name them. Which has no actual game effect. But is entertaining enough, I suppose, except for the fact that they often tell you what to write in the name field. Whoopie!
Some of the choices you make are random. For example you are given side quests were you have the option, while playing the game, to take actions that change things.
Change things how? Who knows! You'll find out later. For example, you are given the option during some chapters to put checks on certain game components. Do they change anything? Who knows. Go ahead and mark them. Maybe that will do something. Will it help? Will it hurt? Who knows! Why am I doing it? Who knows! When they get checked later, is it clear how they effected things? Not at all!
Some of the situations can be easily gamed. For example, there are often cases where, prior to the haunt, you have no time pressure, and there are sometimes situations where, by doing things methodically, you can absolutely guarantee that a haunt will not happen until you've completely searched the entirety of the house and super-powered all of your characters. Or at the very least until you've gotten the heirloom bonuses for the future. There are also some haunts where this can happen at the end - the haunt has been solved but there's one more action to do and there's no more time pressure, so go around and make sure you've received all the future heirloom possibilities you can.
But worst of all, the rules are a disaster. Every single chapter we did, without fail, had multiple rule ambiguities. Most of them were easy enough to discuss and figure out a fair solution, but it was a waste of time, not just in figuring out a fair solution, but in combing through all the rulebooks just to make sure we weren't missing something. And some of the rules don't even make sense thematically, like the fact that you can only use weapons for attack, not for when you are defending. What's that you say? You used weapon abilities when you defended? I'm not surprised, the rules are tricky to figure out, but that's actually against the rules because the weapons are specifically an "ATTACK" action that you do on your turn. But it doesn't really make *sense* that way, does it?
What's really sad is that so many of them could easily have been cleared up with a little playtesting and a small amount of rulebook rewriting. But instead we're left scouring the rulebooks and the internet and just eventually having to come to a consensus as to the most reasonable answer.
But sometimes, it's worse than that, and the rule ambiguities can be a complete game changer. The rules aren't clear and two different (and reasonable interpretations) can completely change the game for the heroes vs the traitor, and it's not clear which one was intended. My day job is to work in verification of large systems of complex rules, so this is my bread and butter, and this is what I'm good at. So I certainly may be more inclined to notice these kind of failures, but regardless, I can say with certainty that I have never seen another game with so many rules problems as *any single one of the Chapters in Betrayal Legacy*. That's right, if I made a list of games according to the worst sets of rules, and treated each Betrayal Legacy chapter as it's own game, the top positions would be all of the Betrayal Legacy chapters that we played. I started to keep a list of all the rules disasters, but then I finally gave up because it was becoming too ridiculous. It's almost like the point of the game is to finally discover that the *real* traitor all along was the rulebook writer!
So - it actually was generally a fun game. But missing on so many points that could have been easily fixed. And much of the time of our Betrayal Legacy nights were spent trying to figure out how to deal with these broken situations in a fair way. That's fun if you're playing CalvinBall, but not if you're playing a Legacy game. I can't help but wonder how much I would be raving about this game if only, if only...