Isn’t it pleasantly reassuring, knowing that one of the most devastating outbreaks of disease in the history of humanity is now available in tabletop gaming?  Rattus is set in Medieval Europe, and players are competing to have the most population surviving at the end of the game after being ravaged by the plague.  While Europe was ravaged the Great Plague for years, you can enjoy experiencing it in less than 60 minutes.

Rattus takes the premise of Pandemic and stands it on its head.  Instead of cooperative, Rattus is cruelly competitive.  Instead of trying to bring diseases under a state of control, Rattus forces players to expand the plague as well as increase the rat population that carries the flea containing the painful and deadly pathogen.

The board is a map of Europe divided into regions.  Each turn, players will place cubes that represent their population.  You place population into one region equal to the amount of rat tokens there.

You also may pick a role and use its power.  You can choose a previously unselected role, or one belonging to an opponent.  Once you have chosen a role, it will remain yours until someone else selects it.  If no one ever picks it, you will have it for the remainder of the game.  You can use any or all of the roles you have, but you can only obtain one new role each turn.

Image courtesy of boardgamegeek.com reviewer EndersGame

Once per turn you also move the plague marker.  Wherever the plague marker lands will trigger the rats there to possibly infect and kill population in the region.  After moving the plague marker but before activating the rats, new rat tokens are placed face down into adjacent regions.

The back of each rat token has a number on it indicating the minimum population that must be in the region in order for it to activate.  For example, if a rat has a value of 4 and there is only 3 population, it will be discarded with no effect.  If a rat does have a sufficient population value, you then look at the icons to determine who will lose population in that region.  There are various icons corresponding to the various roles.  If you have role(s) matching the icons on the rat, you too will lose population.  For each M, whoever has the majority of cubes there loses.  For each A, all players suffer death.

Image courtesy of boardgamegeek.com reviewer EndersGame

Rattus has the weight and rules density of a family game, yet it has lots of ways to be nasty and mean.  In a game about the plague, you’d expect a massive death toll, and Rattus meets those expectations.  While the ruleset is simple and can be explained and comprehended quickly, the game allows for a lot of ways to be cruel.  In that regard it is reminiscent of Survive, in that both games are approachably simple yet cutthroat.

On most turns you will be placing new rat tokens.  Since more rat tokens means more chances of infections, this can be used to hurt other players.  You will also move the plague marker each turn to cause rats to flip and bring death to the region.  This is often a take-that moment.  One of the biggest ways to hurt your opponents is using the roles to enhance the hurt caused by moving the plague marker or placing new rats.

While the game is simple, it also provides a surprising amount of depth.  Each turn offers meaningful, thoughtful choices.  While there’s lots of opportunities to be spiteful, players will learn nuance and depth of when to take counter intuitive tactics like putting rats and triggering the plague in your own territory.

The role selection is the most fascinating part of the game.  One of the intriguing parts about the roles is the combos you’re able to assemble.  While you assume greater risk, putting together multiple powers let’s you do interesting things.  For example, if there was a region with one rat, you’d be able to put out one cube and it would be at risk.  However, if you had the bishop, you could move another rat into the territory, allowing you to place 2.  If you also had the peasant, it lets you put out an extra population, for a total of 3.  Then, if you had the merchant, you could move all 3 of those cubes to an adjacent region that perhaps has no rats.  You would go from 1 population that is under some risk to 3 population with no direct threat of infection.

You can put together cool role selection combos to help you and keep yourself safe, but you can also use them to bring death to your opponent’s population.  The knight let’s you increase the chances that a rat is eligible to kill people.  The merchant lets you move rat tokens, which can mean they leave you and go to your opponents.  You can do the witch switch, which let’s you look at and swap 2 rat tokens.

Each role you select also provides an element of risk.  The more roles you have, the more likely a rat will trigger death of your population.  However, with lots of roles, you’ll have lots of powers and abilities to have control over what’s going on in the game.  Taking a role from someone has similar risks that have to be weighed.  On one hand, you’ve taken a power away from someone.  On the other hand, they are less likely to be vulnerable when it comes time to see who a rat kills.

The risks taken in choosing a role makes me draw a connection between Rattus and Citadels.  In Citadels, choosing a powerful role makes you a target of the “take-that” characters, and in Rattus, compiling roles make you a target of the black rats themselves.  Rattus and Citadels also have parallels in that the role selection is the most interesting part of the game.

If you expand the game at all, more roles will come into play, and you may end up with a different combination of roles each game.  This takes an already interesting decision point and multiplying it’s depth.   It almost becomes like Dominion, in the sense that you evaluate the powers that are available for a given session and try to determine which combination of abilities will be the most effective.

Another risk this game makes you manage is population placement.  The most surviving population wins, so you want to be dropping as many of those cubes as you can.  However, you can only place new population in a region equal to the rats there.  The fewer rats, the fewer risk, but the fewer population.  But with more rats, the more population you can place, but with that comes higher risk that one or more of the rat tokens will kill your population.

Rattus has a decent amount of chaos in terms of if and who a rat will kill.  Rat tokens are normally placed blindly and you don’t know what the rat could kill.  There can be times where the game is greatly swayed by great luck or misfortune by having either rats that cause no harm or rats that deliver devastation.  The roles give you a lot of ways to mitigate this chaos, but it doesn’t prevent it entirely.  Given the depth, rules density, and the duration of the session, the level of chaos feels appropriate to me.  There’s not too much luck to make the game no longer a challenge of skill, but there is sufficient randomness to make things interesting.

The randomness of the rats and the unpredictability of other player’s choices makes Rattus a very tactical game.  Your decisions are generally focused on the here and now.  The location of the plague marker, rat tokens, and surviving population by your next turn is nearly impossible to predict, making for a very short term decision making.

Rattus achieves double honor by being the best board game in two different genres.  It is both the best board game in which players manipulate rats as well as the best game that features the Black Death.  It kills two birds with one stone, so to speak.  Rattus is by far the most enjoyable Rats on a Map (ROAM) game.

Since the subject matter is off the beaten path, Rattus’s setting is weirdly refreshing.  The Black Death may not be an attractive subject matter and isn’t a topic that many people would seek out.  Rats aren’t particularly beloved animals, so they are not prominently featured in all that many games.  So I have to give Rattus credit and recognition for covering an area that’s rarely explored in board games.  I like that it takes place in something outside the norm.

So I think you’ll have a blast playing a game about a disease that caused puss oozing lymph nodes in your groin to swell as large as an egg and resulted in subepidermal hemorrhages and gangrene that caused unsightly skin discolorations. Unlike the real Black Death, Rattus will not induce vomiting blood, but instead provide an hour of meaningful decisions with an exciting payoff.

This game is, without a doubt, something special. This is far beyond one new gimmick, but rather took several genius ideas, and compounded them into a gaming experience unequal to anything else. Risk Legacy is hailed for its innovation, and rightly so. At the same time, I don’t want to just gush over the obvious novelties Legacy is famous for, but also evaluate if there are interesting decisions in the game play itself.

It should be noted that this review is spoiler free. There is nothing discussed that couldn’t be discovered just by reading the starting rules or examining the immediately available components and cards.

I grew up on risk. I still remember my first game as an early teen. Can you believe I actually went for Asia? I stayed up all night fascinated by the strategic potential. Can you believe I actually thought there was tons of strategic potential? While my gaming tastes have exponentially grown, my fondness for the risk family has remained. I moved on from Risk to Lord of the Rings Risk, both Star Wars Risks, Risk 2210, and then reached critical mass to explode into hobby board gaming at large. To me, Risk Legacy represents my hobby coming full circle – the game that started the spark is now my biggest flame.

Legacy has at least 3 groundbreaking new elements. Foremost, you get to permanently modify the game in ways that has lasting impact on all future plays. If you’ve read or heard anything about Legacy, you’re probably already familiar with this feature. The game has a memory. You will be placing stickers on the board, writing on the board, and destroying cards.

These modifications will stay and impact all future games. This new concept has gotten a lot of attention and excitement, and like any bold new idea, a fair amount apprehension and skepticism. But there’s just nothing like the exciting payoff of when you make these forever decisions.

There are many things that trigger the ability to make a change to the game. Most of them happen at the end of a session. The winner gets to select from a menu of options, while those who simply were not eliminated also get a couple of choices. These rewards at the end of a session only last for the first 15 plays. Here are some of the permanent modifications you get to make:

Scars: theses are stickers that go onto a territory, and either enhance or hurt the territory. For example, you start the game with scar stickers that could either give +1 or -1 to defense die rolls in that territory. Forever. When you play these, you gotta think about not just the immediate impact to the current battle, but how it will shape continent balance and stability (or the diabolical lack thereof).

The game promotes, although it doesn’t necessitate, players being loyal to certain areas of the board. Shaping the board so that your area is advantageous in future plays is a decision of special significance. Risk Legacy, through scars, now has a number of ways to give a territory a special ability. For example, imagine hurting the defensive ability of Central America, and how that decreases the viability of controlling the continent commonly referred to as North America, and how that in turn increases the attractiveness of the continent of Strong Arm de Kilheffer, known in vanilla risk as South America.

Factions: For each faction, there are 2 powers to choose from before the first game. Select one, destroy the other. Additional faction powers will be unlocked as the game progresses. This means you’ll have factions with a unique set of 5 or 6 characteristics. It was a nice touch to have different factions for a risk game. It was a huge leap forward to have factions that are completely different than say, the same factions in my buddy’s copy of Legacy. It’s an extra layer of awesomeness to watch the factions develop, evolve, and grow over time. Much like an interesting character that develops in a story, you’ll start to watch these factions grow depth and personality. Your world will have a history, and so will your factions. Some will wax, some will wane.

One minor criticism is that most of the starting faction powers seem to have an obvious “better” choice, resulting in a lot groups selecting the same or similar sets of starting powers. This is mitigated by the powers unlocked later. As you get further into the game, the new powers will get more interesting, as will the method of assigning new powers.

Territory incentive: Each territory has a corresponding card, and that card is worth a certain amount of coins. At the start of your turn, you can cash in the sum of all your coins on your cards for troops. The more coin, the more troops. You may possibly draw an incentivized territory if you control it at the end of your turn. Players are in complete control of which territories get incentivized. If you don’t win a game but instead merely avoid elimination, you’ll have the option to add a coin incentive to a territory card. If you win, you even have the chance to destroy a territory card. As you get further into more plays, the choice of territory incentive becomes more interesting as the ramifications of high coinage increases.

Naming Stuff: At the conclusion of each session, players may have the option to found cities. As the icing on the cake, you get to name them. If you win a session, you have the option to name a continent. And, after 15 plays, the player with the most victories gets to name the earth. Naming continents and cities adds a type of creative outlet not often present in strategy boardgames. You’re not just crafting creative strategies, but you get the chance to put some funny or memorable names permanently written on the board.

This underscores just how personalized the game becomes, and allows all participants to have a sense of ownership. Every player gets the ability to make their mark, permanently add, and get personally invested in not just one game session, but their unique copy of Legacy. I may be the one that purchased my copy, but there are 9 guys that own it, because it has their name is on it, their input shaped it, they made decisions that impact all future players of this game, and they and they alone have bonuses and incentives in Earth 00001566.

There’s other ways you can permanently modify the game, which are very exciting and alter the game in enormous ways. I just can’t tell you about them. Maniacal laugh, maniacal laugh!

Another groundbreaking new feature for a boardgame is unlockable game elements. This is a double stroke of genius. The permanent decisions alone would’ve been innovative enough. But, combined with that, are sealed compartments in the game that are not to be opened unless certain game requirements are met. This coupled with making permanent additions to the board is double revolutionary. The concept of something that is hidden for you, the eagerness, the wait, and the excitement of the long anticipated revelation of a secret, is now all incorporated into a board game. Isn’t it incredible that board game reviews now have to be accompanied by spoiler disclaimers?

Image courtesy of boardgamegeek.com reviewer EndersGame

This takes something routine like learning new rules, and giving it the Christmas morning effect. Normally, turning the page in rulebook isn’t an exciting, thrill packed moment. But now, as you play, you can satisfy requirements to add new surprise rules to the game. Opening new components and learning new rules because you’ve earned the right to discover the secret is far more engaging than flipping to an “Advanced Rules” section of the rulebook.

A third innovation is not only will the game be uniquely customized through altering territory powers, adding permanent cities, etc, but there will be special powers and abilities granted to you. Even if two copies of Legacy happened to have the identical customizations made to everything, there will be special abilities granted to Theodore Geisel on one copy that he will not have on another copy. For example, if you get the honor of naming a continent, it will grant you and you alone the ability to get +1 dude for controlling that continent.

The joy is in the journey. But the customizations and sealed components will reach an end. When it’s all said and done, you will have a game no different than any other in your collection, in that it’s completely playable, yet static. This is often misunderstood, so to be completely clear, Legacy will never reach a point where you can no longer play it. It will never be disposable.

Just because it reaches the end of possible customizations, doesn’t mean it will reach an end in playability. It does not expire after 15 plays. And just because you hit 15 plays doesn’t mean every packet is opened, every scar is played, every faction power is assigned, and every card I can’t tell you about has seen play. Every other game you love works just fine without being able to write on it, destroy it, and put stickers on it, and so does Legacy. Although I must admit, Legacy has spoiled me. Every other game where I can’t sign the board has become a letdown.

The gimmicky (in this context I use gimmicky as a term of endearment) parts of this game have been much heralded, and it’s absolutely well deserved heraldry indeed. But Legacy’s other success hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention – the actual game play. Without interesting decisions with an exciting payoff, this would just be a cross between a board game and a coloring book. It’s important to know that the game, without the awesome gimmicky stuff, has satisfactory depth in its own right.

Territories, continents, factions, and players themselves will develop a unique set of abilities over time. Legacy gives you the opportunity to create cool combos, in terms of pairing factions, starting territories, and yourself. As factions gain more abilities, as continents become modified, as more scars are unlocked and placed, and as players themselves gain bonuses, you begin to be able to put together a knock out combo of yourself, your faction, and your continent. In this way Legacy gives you long term strategic choices spanning multiple sessions.

Players start in only 1 territory, and must expand through empty territories to reach other players. With all those empty territories and wiggle room, doesn’t that delay aggression? In Risk 2210, one of the small drawbacks is the potential for the lack of conflict in the first turn or two because of the empty territories. Legacy does not have that problem. It’s very common for the game to end with lots of territories still empty, because attacking your opponent is (usually) so much better than expanding into an empty territory.

Legacy plays fast and furious. The level of aggression that Legacy promotes is comparable to Nexus Ops or Summoner Wars. There are two things (that I can tell you about) that put players at each other’s throats immediately. One is the victory condition itself. You need 4 red stars to win. Each faction starts with an HQ. Each HQ you control counts as a red star. People will have to try to conquer bases and go right after the heart of their opponents in order to win.

The other aggression incentive is the cards for combatants cash in system, which is rather clever. In order to draw a card with coinage at the end of your turn, you must conquer a territory from another player, not just expand into an empty region. At any given time there are 4 territory cards available to draw from, and the 4 that are available will rotate throughout the game. At the end of the turn, if you’ve taken at least one territory from an opponent, you will get one a card. If you own one of the four displayed cards, you take one of them. If you don’t own one, you’ll draw a generic coin card, worth only one. Those territories with more coins are enormously important, and those territories will be fought after with such force that it will cost the lives of many genetically enhanced bear riding muscular face painters.

Reading through the rulebook, it’s no spoiler that there will be starting placement rules to unlock. Once you’ve unlocked them, you will delve into new depth in the game. Starting setup is going to be a fascinating, challenging decision point. The weight, importance, and interestingness of the starting placement will be comparable to the starting placement in Catan.

Risk, in all its iterations, has fulfilled its titular promise to provide decisions based on risk. Every attack you make, you risk weakening yourself. Every success you have puts you at risk of being a target. Going for the victory presents a risk, which if unsuccessful, will make the next player’s potential for winning even higher. Even if it’s just to conquer a well defended but incentivized territory, each turn will have push your luck style decisions. Every session has given me agonizing decisions of “should I go for it, or should I gather strength and wait?”

Not only are you presented with the interesting decision of going for the risk, but you also need to figure out how to go about it. All of the faction powers and territory modifications really make for an interesting dudes on a map game. Instead of a board of 42 territories of equal value, the defensive and strategic value of the territories will have a lot of variability. Your evaluation of the map and forming your battle plan will become more interesting as the board and factions evolve. Minor tweaks are going to begin to have big consequences in your decision making. As more ways to gain red stars are unlocked, the more opportunities arise to put together a creative path to victory.

Missiles are another interesting decision point. For every prior win, you receive a missile token. Each missile can be used once per session to change any battle die rolled by anyone into a 6. Since each missile token can be used only once, judging the timing of the best use of them is an interesting decision. As the game develops, so will the difficulty of your missile choices. Trust me on that.

I tried to break this game. I really did. What’s the best continent in basic risk? Australia. Would Australia be broken if only one person could ever start in there? Would it be broken if that person got 4 troops for controlling it, not just 2? Would it be broken if the customization of that continent gave that same player a natural single handed advantage for the event cards that were unlocked? Close. As you start to have concerns over player balance, continent balance, faction balance, turn order balance, the game comes to its own rescue with new materials. Every time the game was about to give players pause, a pack was opened and saved the day. Trust me, this game knows what it’s doing. It’s like a toilet with a sensor that automatically flushes. It knows how to take care of the crap you leave.

When you make these permanent, game altering decisions, it isn’t just about tweaking a map feature that could impact anyone in future games in unpredictable ways. You are making strategic decisions to help yourself in later sessions. You can turn Africa into a well defended power house, and it could be something that only you would gain the most benefit from. Some of the most interesting and difficult decisions were the ones I made after winning a game and choosing how I would modify the board. Due to the gravity of the decision, more than once we allowed folks to think about their choice throughout the week to be finalized at the following game night.

The game rewards you for winning. The thrill of victory is no longer the only benefit of conquering your foes. This creates an incentive to win and play well beyond the naturally present desire to win. For starters, you get to sign the game board. Isn’t that cool? Then, you get to modify the game in a way that only the winner can. Then, in all future games, you’ll get one missile for every time you’ve signed the board.

For me, this is a highly potent tension creation function. Part of what creates tension in a board game is the desire to win coupled with the difficulty in obtaining it. As these grow, it produces tension, which results in being emotionally invested in the game. Since the game itself increases the desire to win the game, beyond just the normal competitive desire, it increases tension. Not just in one session, but across the campaign as the world is formed. The victor rewards also motivate players to keep the game balanced, because players are even more incentivized to prevent players from winning, in order to keep their overall advantage across sessions in check.

There’s also a few nice little touches to Legacy that are a little above and beyond and help create this new experience. First, on the game box you have to break the seal:

Image courtesy of boardgamegeek.com reviewer EndersGame

And its got a frickin handle to carry the game with. Who does that, anyway? (In this context I use frickin as a term of endearment) Then, before you play, you must sign a contractual agreement:

Image courtesy of boardgamegeek.com reviewer EndersGame

And then, as you try to pimp your game storage and remove the tray (or browse forums), you discover this little mind game:

Image courtesy of boardgamegeek.com reviewer EndersGame

It can’t be overstated just how brilliant this game is. It gives you the chance to make permanent decisions during play that simultaneously has immediate and long term strategic game play consequences. It gets better every time you play it in a very real way. Every copy of Legacy becomes an original. It becomes something you and your buddies created. It’s true what the box says – you play it, change it, and make it yours.