Plaid Hat Podcast listeners (or “Dougs”, if you prefer) have known about this for a while, but Rob Daviau, the mind between the revolutionary perma-change elements of Risk Legacy, has since left Hasbro and is working on a new Legacy game.
That game, SeaFall, has just been announced. It is being published (unsurprisingly) by Plaid Hat Games. From the press release:
SeaFall is a 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) set in an age of sail world that is reminiscent of our world. In SeaFall the world is just starting to claw its way out of a dark age and has just begun to rediscover seafaring technology. Players take on the role of a main land empire who each consult with a consortium of advisors to discover new islands, explore those islands, develop trade, send out raiding parties, take part in ship to ship combat, and more.
And what’s more, the veteran designers in the Plaid Hat Games stable have even exclaimed on their post-GenCon podcast episode just how much their minds have been blown by Daviau’s current prototype and the kinds of things it will do.
After having nearly completed the Risk Legacy campaign with my group, my biggest criticism with the game (aside from the notorious difficulty of peeling those damned stickers) has long been that it’s still Risk – a fickle game of (mis)fortune, where victory too often rides on the back of a couple rolls of the dice. I definitely applaud Daviau for making the appalling idea of a Risk campaign so compelling, but the promise of a Legacy game freed of those design handcuffs has me pumping my fists in eager anticipation.