Leacock and Daviau live 3,000 miles away from each other, with Daviau based in New York and Leacock living in California.
The concept had great potential, but there were already a bunch of obstacles standing between design and execution.
The notion of combining this with a strong narrative arc also appealed to Daviau, who started out in his career at Hasbro as a writer, and has always been keen on bringing story to boardgames. With every month played it would evolve, introducing either new challenges for the player to overcome, or new tools to help them solve an already existing challenge. The idea was that Pandemic Legacy would take place over the course of a calendar year, with players playing each month of that year at least once. you’re constantly ripping these things up and destroying them. It was this rich soup of ideas that we could thread together, but use narrative to kind of stitch-em in a way so that they wouldn’t be overwhelming.” “And at the time we had a lot of Pandemic products out on the market as well. “I was looking at how each of the games could be a TV episode, and they could then roll over a longer, richer story,” he says. “The only other one I’d done at the time was Risk… so I was very much in this mindset of players acting as checks and balances on each other.”Ī very early prototype of the Pandemic Legacy board.įortunately, Leacock had plenty of experience designing games where the game has to do that balancing, and he had a plan for how to use the Legacy concept as a balancing agent. “I did caution Matt right at the beginning, saying “I don’t think this Legacy idea is gonna work with a coop ,” Daviau says. When he received an email from Leacock on the subject of Pandemic Legacy, he was intrigued, but sceptical. Risk Legacy wowed board gamers when it launched, and its success came just as Daviau left Hasbro after fifteen years. Risk Legacy even contained six sealed boxes that were gradually opened in specific circumstances, introducing whole new mechanics and features. Stickers could be added to the board that would permanently alter the rules. Players were encouraged to write on the board and rip up certain cards. Players would play through a campaign of fifteen rounds wherein the game would change radically. The idea debuted in 2011 with Risk Legacy, which took the vanilla mechanics of Risk and infused Daviau’s Legacy concept. This sparked the idea for a boardgame where the board and the rules evolve each time it's played. The idea arose during a conversation with his coworkers about Cluedo, in the form of a joke about why Dr Black repeatedly invites guests to his house when they keep murdering him. Rob Daviau created his first Legacy game while still working at Hasbro. “I was really, suddenly very hooked by the idea, and thought the best place to go would be to go look up the guy who invented the whole concept.” But the notion wouldn’t go away, and after a few months of Pandemic Legacy buzzing in his mind, Leacock began sketching out concepts for how it might work. “We thought about ‘Oh we could do a card game, we could do a dice game, we could do a Legacy game.’ And um, that suggestion came up and I kinda laughed, ‘cause I thought, oh right, that’s gonna happen,” Leacock says.