Who doesn't love destroying stuff?
Well, not everyone does.
Who doesn't love change?
Well, most people don't.
Who wants to do the same thing all over again?
Well, that depends.
Legacy games have been around since 2011 when Risk Legacy came out. It continued with Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 that ran through the ranking charts like a Usain Bolt of board games. If you look at the ranking of these two games compared to their non-legacy parents you'll see that people rank the young legacy games much higher.
Nothing is similar between the two non-legacy games. Risk is kind of a war game with dice rolling and player elimination while Pandemic is a sleek and streamlined co-op.
Why? How?
Statistics (let's start dry)
From a purely statistical point of view, you should look at the field you are sampling. In other words, are the same people playing the original and legacy games? The question is if you love Game X, will you play Game X Legacy? Probably yes. Now, if you hate Game Y, will you pick up Game Y Legacy? Probably not.
This changes the sampling field drastically. You take the low end of rankers and cut them out. This alone will change the ranking by quite a large margin.
Make it yours
What makes a legacy game is the story telling aspect of it. The change in the game is not just a change, but also a story. The changes on the board, the things getting lost or added, the irreversible decisions that later come to bite you back and the utter destruction of the box content. You make it yours. The game directs the storyline, you react to it and your reactions is what counts at the end of the day.
Simple things you don't even think of like naming your character after your favorite movie star or calling your capital city "Grandes Luchadores" make you feel connected to the game. You are still playing Pandemic with the same actions (basically), you are still rolling the same dice to attack. Only now you are not curing London with 'the medic' since it is Samuel L. Jackson. Oh, and you must defend Grandes Luchadores at all costs because you don't want such a cleverly named city to be ruined.
This is one of the places where Rob Daviau Shines.
Maybe they are just better?
I guess they are. But almost every game is when you revisit it after a years of the game being out and about, getting a giant amount of reviews. This is especially true for the case of Pandemic that also got an impressive amount of expansions where its mechanics constantly evolved.
Take a game people love, build a nice storyline, tweak with the mechanics as the game goes along, give the players the chance to become a part of the game and you got yourself an improved version of gameplay experience. Easy to say, hard to do.
So where does it stand now?
Right now a new game is going to come out, SeaFall. This is going to be the first legacy game that will not have a non-legacy parent. For me this game will be the real measure for legacy. Rob Daviau, once again, takes things one step further and I can't wait to see what comes out, both as a gamer and designer.
* Image taken form SeaFall entry at BoardGameGeek.com