Should Legacy Board Games Have Post-Game Replayability?
I’ve just recently finished my second complete campaign of Charterstone from Stonemaier Games, and although the game itself wore on me as I passed 20 total games of Charterstone played, it was still a good experience both times I worked through the 12 games required to complete the campaign. As I was packing up the game and applying new stickers to the rulebook for the post-game experience, I began to ask myself a pretty important question: am I going to play this again?
A complete game of Charterstone is 12 sessions, and with 5 or 6 players, each session will take well over an hour to complete. I would assume that after our campaign was over, we were somewhere around the 18 hours mark, give or take 2 hours (including setup each time). Charterstone, as a game system, was really fun, and unlocking new buildings, getting new cards, finding new minions, and more kept each game interesting. But after 12, do I want to play this again?
I had two copies of Charterstone, and finally have condensed it down to one, recycling the other including the gameboard. I wonder, though, how long the other version will sit on my shelf before I decide to dump it as well. See, the biggest draw for Charterstone, in my opinion, is building new buildings and opening crates to see what goodies you might unlock. The worker placement elements and resource management elements are pretty basic, and are things we’ve seen in 100s of games. Grab resources, spend resources, grab resources, spend resources.
After you complete Charterstone, especially at 5 or 6 players, the buildings are mostly built, and the chests are almost completely opened. So when you apply the end-of-game rule stickers to the rulebook, you’ve lost two really great elements of the game: building and opening. And these locations still exist on the gameboard for post-campaign games, but you don’t actually build anything and you don’t actually open anything – you just spend resources and earn points. And after trying that once, it just wasn’t fun.
The replayability wasn’t what drew me to Charterstone – it was the doing all the unlocking. So for my money, the campaign more than gave me an experience that was worth every penny I paid (I paid for one copy, the other was a review copy). But I do think that Charterstone is a board game life lesson, that the post-campaign experience isn’t necessarily one I want to partake in, and to that end, I shouldn’t bank on wanting to play a game after a campaign is over. Don’t use the knowledge that you can play Charterstone after you finish the campaign to justify what you plan to purchase it for – that post-game experience just isn’t worth it. And if it is not worth it for Charterstone, in what other games is it just not worth it?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
Article By Adam
