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Game details Designer: Rob Daviau

Publisher: Plaid Hat Games

Players: 3-5

Age: 14+

Playing time: 90-120 minutes

Price: $79.99/£99.99 ( Rob DaviauPlaid Hat Games3-514+90-120 minutes: $79.99/£99.99 ( $57 on Amazon

You might have heard about SeaFall. It’s comfortably one of the most hyped board game releases of the past couple of years, the first so-called “legacy” game to be designed from the ground up as such, rather than one reconstituted on the bones of an older game.

But unlike Pandemic: Legacy, its direct forebear, which rightly bathes in near-universal acclaim and therefore set the hype-train in motion, SeaFall is an incredibly divisive game. Since release, it has become the subject of hundreds of forum battles, a magnet first for pre-orders and then cancellations after the first tentative reviews suggested it might not be the second coming of Jesus. Since its release in October, the controversy has kept up, and there has been precious little critical consensus. So is it any good?

The short answer is “yes, very.” But there’s a long answer too, and that one starts with a “but”...

Ye olde story booke

SeaFall is an incredible work of flawed genius. Its central conceit is its "legacy" aspect: it was designed to be played between about 12 and 20 times—and no more—by the same group of three, four, or five players over the course of about 45 hours. Players permanently alter the game as they play it—writing on the board, triggering the introduction of new rules, and generally making the game their own unique experience through their actions.

At the start of things, the players, as mainland noble families beginning to explore the western sea, start with two plastic ships at one edge of a large, mostly empty board. There are a couple of nearby unexplored islands and a whole expanse of empty hexagonal sea. Aside from a vague mandate to explore, it’s not entirely clear what you’re meant to be doing. Slowly, over the course of the next dozen-and-a-half games, that purpose is revealed via a series of six sealed cardboard chests emblazoned with arcane symbols. The chests are lined neatly to one side of the game box, and players are strictly banned from peeking at their contents until the appointed time.

SeaFall starts out as a trading game. You name your leader, country, and ships and set sail to the nearby islands. In the first game, the first player to land on an island names it, writing whatever they like in the white space provided on the board. Each island has a certain number of sites to visit, with various strange symbols on them. Using their ships and a small cast of character cards you purchase along the way, these sites are gradually explored, using dice rolls against ability scores.



















If you succeed at a roll, you consult a manual named the “Captain’s Booke,” presumably by someone who has never actually read any Elizabethan English. This book contains 400 or so story entries, a map, and a section at the back sealed by perforated card and more dire "no-looking" warnings. You cross-reference the site symbol on the island against a number on the map, read the corresponding entry in the book, and voilà—a two-step choose-your-own adventure. For instance, you meet some natives who seem friendly, but they’re leaving offerings to an idol of a golden god. Do you pinch the goods or respect the natives' wishes?

The book then tells you how to change the board, in this instance by taking a sticker from one of three big old sheets that come in the box and placing it on the island site to label it as a site that produces a type of good or hosts a mine or a market. There are hundreds of stickers, by the way: whirlpools, new islands, weird statues, and plenty of symbols with no current meaning but plenty of portent.

So the first game, the prologue, proceeds. It finishes more or less at the same time as each of the four islands are named, and the four corresponding entries written on quest cards are read out. And then you pack it up and start again, except the board isn’t completely virgin and unexplored this time around. Now there are spice fields on the islands, perhaps, or an iron deposit, or a dock. Meanwhile, some additional quests have been revealed via an entry in the book (don’t worry if this isn’t immediately clear; the game is fairly clear when something needs to be opened—it’s just less adept at telling you that you don’t need to know everything at any given time). And so on—pretty much every session gets more complex and gives you more stuff to play with. My group has now opened three of the sealed chests, and the board is crammed with cool stuff and islands with absurd names. There is so much to do now that we had no inkling would come at the start.

A grand legacy

Designed By Rob Daviau, one of the progenitors of the fledgling legacy genre, SeaFall is an auteur’s game through and through. It’s packed with goodies, and it really is possible to play as a corsair, a trader, an explorer, or a [redacted] to your heart’s content. There are masses of secondary characters, a whole system of building a town and upgrading ships, and a rich, developing story that my group, just seven games in, is coming to love.

The legacy aspect shines through wonderfully. Players can name pretty much everything: their homelands, leaders, and ships; islands they discover and colonies they found; and the innumerable advisers they hire along the way. I’m a writer, so I love this stuff, and I'll contentedly spend ages pondering an apposite name for a newly hired pirate. Certain members of my group don’t have brains that run this way, and it has caused friction. I get annoyed that they aren’t taking the immersion seriously when they give a new ne’er-do-well too basic an epithet or can’t be bothered to name the damn atoll they’ve just found. They fume at my nagging while they’re trying to optimize their next turn. This is the dichotomy that fuels so much of the division surrounding SeaFall: there’s a lot of chafing between the experience versus the mechanics.

Of the actual names we picked, the less said is probably the better of the sophomoric work of five overgrown manchildren—but we enjoyed it nevertheless. Every time Windy Pete the windcaller or Diego Fantastico appear, there’s a titter around the table.

As you can see, I love this game, but despite all this fanboying gush, I’m not blind to its flaws, of which there are many.