Top 20 Epic Legacy Board Games to watch unfold with Friends Like a Binge-Worthy TV Series
Remember that feeling? The one where you and your friends finish an episode of a gripping TV series, the credits roll on a shocking cliffhanger, and everyone immediately screams, "Just one more episode!"? Now, imagine you aren't just watching the story. You're living it. You're making the decisions that cause those cliffhangers, and your choices permanently shape the world for the next "episode."
Welcome to the world of legacy board games. This incredible genre takes the one-off experience of a typical board game and transforms it into an evolving, multi-session campaign. You'll write on the board, tear up cards, open sealed boxes with secret components, and apply stickers that forever alter the rules. Each session builds on the last, creating a unique story that belongs entirely to your group. It’s the ultimate cooperative storytelling experience, a season of television you create together around a table.
As a huge fan of immersive experiences, I, Goh Ling Yong, have found that nothing captures the magic of a shared journey quite like a legacy game. To help you find your group's next great adventure, I’ve compiled a list of the 20 most epic legacy board games out there. From saving the world to building a fantasy empire, there’s a binge-worthy story waiting for you.
1. Pandemic Legacy: Season 1
Often hailed as the game that catapulted the legacy genre into the mainstream, Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is an absolute masterclass in tension and narrative. You and your friends play as a team of disease-fighting specialists trying to stop four deadly viruses from overwhelming the globe. The core gameplay is familiar to anyone who's played the original Pandemic, but the legacy campaign turns it into a heart-pounding, year-long fight for survival.
The story unfolds over 12-24 sessions, each representing a month of the year. Your decisions have real, permanent consequences. Cities can panic and fall into chaos, characters can gain scars (or worse), and the viruses themselves can mutate in terrifying new ways. The game constantly introduces shocking plot twists through sealed boxes and a "Legacy Deck" of cards, making each session feel like a crucial episode in a high-stakes medical thriller.
Tip: Get attached to your characters! Give them backstories. The emotional weight of the game is amplified when you truly care about the little plastic pawns you're sending into danger.
2. Gloomhaven
If Pandemic Legacy is a tense TV drama, Gloomhaven is a sprawling, 100-hour fantasy epic like Game of Thrones, but with more monster-slaying. This behemoth of a box contains a cooperative campaign where players take on the roles of wandering adventurers in a dark and persistent world. You'll explore dungeons, fight horrifying monsters, and make choices that ripple across the entire campaign.
What sets Gloomhaven apart is its brilliant, card-based combat system. It’s a tactical puzzle that rewards clever teamwork and strategic planning, completely eliminating the randomness of dice rolls. As you play, your characters will level up, retire, and unlock new classes, all while you place stickers on the world map, permanently opening up new locations and storylines. It’s a massive commitment, but the payoff is an unforgettable adventure.
3. Frosthaven
How do you follow up one of the most successful board games of all time? You go bigger, deeper, and colder. Frosthaven is the highly anticipated successor to Gloomhaven, set in a harsh, frozen outpost at the edge of the world. While it maintains the core tactical combat system that fans love, it adds a whole new layer of city-building and resource management.
Between brutal dungeon crawls, you'll be responsible for building up the town of Frosthaven, crafting new gear, and protecting it from the elements and invading forces. The narrative is even more branching and complex, with new character classes to unlock and mysteries to solve. It’s an even more ambitious undertaking than its predecessor, perfect for groups who finished Gloomhaven and immediately asked, "What's next?"
4. Scythe: The Rise of Fenris
Scythe is a beautifully crafted engine-building game set in an alternate-history 1920s Europe filled with giant mechs. The Rise of Fenris is an expansion that transforms this competitive sandbox game into a cohesive, 8-episode narrative campaign. It cleverly weaves a compelling story into the existing mechanics without feeling forced.
The campaign introduces new elements progressively, from new mech abilities to secret factions, all hidden within five tuckboxes. The story can be played cooperatively or competitively, and the modules within can be used to enhance the base game even after the campaign is over. It's a brilliant way to breathe new life and narrative depth into an already fantastic game.
5. Risk Legacy
This is the one that arguably kicked off the modern legacy craze. Designer Rob Daviau took a classic, often-maligned game—Risk—and turned it into something revolutionary. In Risk Legacy, the world is yours to shape. The winner of each of the first 15 games gets to make a permanent change to the board, like founding a major city or naming a continent.
Factions gain new abilities, cards are destroyed, and sealed compartments on the game box are opened when certain conditions are met, revealing game-changing new rules. It transforms Risk from a game of simple world domination into a story about the history of a world that your group created. Old grudges and alliances will carry over from game to game, making every battle deeply personal.
6. Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
Intimidated by the massive box and price tag of Gloomhaven? Jaws of the Lion is your perfect entry point. This standalone game is a smaller, more accessible, and story-focused prequel. It features four new characters and a 25-scenario campaign that brilliantly teaches you the rules as you play.
The first five scenarios serve as a tutorial, introducing new mechanics gradually. Instead of a modular tile board, the scenarios are played directly in a spiral-bound book, dramatically cutting down on setup time. It delivers the same fantastic tactical combat and character progression as its bigger sibling in a much more manageable package. It’s the perfect "pilot season" to see if the Gloomhaven universe is right for you.
7. Betrayal Legacy
The original Betrayal at House on the Hill is a classic horror game of exploration and sudden, dramatic betrayal. Betrayal Legacy takes that concept and stretches it across centuries, with your group playing as different generations of families tied to the cursed house.
The campaign starts in 1666 and progresses through the modern day. Each game, you explore the house, but the items you find, the omens you encounter, and the haunts that trigger are all tied to an overarching story. The house itself becomes a character, with rooms you discover and events that permanently scar the board. It’s a brilliant, spooky, and often hilarious multi-generational horror story.
8. Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated
Based on the popular Dungeons & Dragons podcast, Clank! Legacy infuses the deck-building dungeon-crawler with a heavy dose of humor and adventure. You and your friends are hopeful interns at the fantastical adventuring franchise Acquisitions Incorporated, trying to prove your worth to your demanding bosses.
You’ll build your deck of cards to move through dungeons, fight monsters, and grab treasure, all while trying not to make too much "Clank!" that attracts the dragon. The legacy campaign has you establishing new franchise headquarters on a double-sided game board, making story choices in a "Book of Secrets," and unlocking a mountain of new content. It’s lighthearted, fun, and incredibly charming.
9. The King's Dilemma
If you're looking for a legacy game that’s less about combat and more about political intrigue and moral quandaries, The King's Dilemma is your ticket. In this game, you are the leaders of powerful noble houses, sitting on the King's Council and advising the monarch on a series of crises facing the kingdom.
The core gameplay is pure negotiation and voting. A "Dilemma Card" is drawn, presenting a problem, and players debate and use their influence to steer the outcome. Every decision you make pushes various kingdom trackers up or down, leading to branching storylines and a truly unique history for your kingdom. It’s a game of heavy consequences and gut-wrenching choices that will have your group debating long after game night is over.
10. Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile
While not a traditional legacy game with sticker sheets and destroyed components, Oath is a "generational" game that absolutely deserves a spot on this list. It's a game about history. The winner of one game doesn't just get victory points; they directly influence the starting conditions for the next game.
The victor's territory becomes the heart of the empire in the following session, their winning condition might become a new rule for everyone, and the cards that were used to build their tableau are shuffled back into the deck for others to find later, like historical artifacts. It creates a rich, player-driven narrative of rise and fall, of empires and exiles, where the board state itself is the chronicle of your group's shared history.
11. My City
Legacy games don't have to be 100-hour epic fantasies. My City is a light, competitive, and incredibly addictive tile-laying game from the legendary designer Reiner Knizia. Each player has their own personal board representing a plot of land where they will build their city.
The campaign is told through 24 short "episodes," with each one introducing a small new rule or scoring objective via a sealed envelope. You’ll be adding stickers to your personal boards, creating a city that is uniquely yours. It’s wonderfully accessible, plays in under 30 minutes, and is perfect for families or groups looking for a lighter legacy experience.
12. Aeon's End: Legacy
Aeon's End is a fantastic cooperative deck-building game where players are powerful breach mages defending the last bastion of humanity from monstrous Nemeses. The legacy version takes this solid foundation and wraps it in an epic campaign where you don't just build a deck—you build a mage.
Over the course of the campaign, you'll customize your starting character with powerful new abilities via stickers, unlock new spells to add to the market, and face off against increasingly clever and terrifying bosses. It’s a challenging puzzle that makes you feel incredibly powerful as you grow from a novice mage into an archmage of legendary status.
13. Charterstone
Imagine a worker-placement game where you start with an almost completely blank board. That's Charterstone. In this competitive legacy game, players are citizens tasked with building a new village. Every time you construct a new building, you take a sticker from a massive sheet and permanently add it to the game board, creating a new action space that anyone can use.
The campaign unfolds over 12 games, with players racing to complete objectives and score the most points. By the end, your group will have created a completely unique village with its own set of buildings and strategies. Best of all, once the campaign is over, the finished board is a fully replayable, one-of-a-kind worker-placement game.
14. Sleeping Gods
Another "legacy-adjacent" title, Sleeping Gods is a massive, open-world campaign game that feels like a choose-your-own-adventure novel brought to life. You and your friends are the crew of the steamship Manticore, lost in a strange and wondrous sea in 1929. Your goal is to find the totems of the gods to awaken them and find your way home.
The game is played using a spiral-bound atlas of maps and a thick storybook. You'll sail from location to location, encountering strange characters, exploring mysterious islands, and engaging in a unique card-based combat system. The world persists between sessions, with your choices and discoveries carrying over. It’s an incredible journey of exploration and storytelling.
15. Pandemic Legacy: Season 2
Set 71 years after the devastating events of Season 1, the world of Season 2 is a very different place. Most of humanity has been wiped out, and the survivors live on floating havens, disconnected from a mainland ravaged by plague. Instead of fighting disease, your job is to venture out from the safety of the sea to supply the few remaining cities on the grid.
Season 2 brilliantly flips the script of the original. The board starts mostly empty, and your goal is one of exploration and reconnection, rather than containment. It’s a story of hope and discovery in a post-apocalyptic world, and it’s just as tense and full of shocking twists as its predecessor.
16. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
If you're looking for a deep, dark, and mature narrative experience, look no further. Tainted Grail is a cooperative survival and exploration game steeped in Arthurian legend and Celtic mythology. The world is being consumed by a strange, encroaching darkness called the Wyrdness, and you are unlikely heroes tasked with saving it.
This game is all about the story, which is delivered through an incredible, multi-hundred-page "Book of Exploration." Every choice you make has weight and can lead you down wildly different paths. It's a challenging game of resource management and survival, with a story that is haunting, beautiful, and utterly unforgettable.
17. ISS Vanguard
For the sci-fi fans, ISS Vanguard is a sprawling, cooperative campaign game of deep space exploration. Think Mass Effect in a board game box. You are members of the first human-led deep space exploration initiative, managing your starship, the ISS Vanguard, and leading landing parties down to the surface of bizarre and wonderful alien planets.
The gameplay is split into two phases: a ship management phase where you'll research tech, manage your crew, and decide where to go next, and a planet exploration phase where you'll use a beautiful logbook to discover the secrets of alien worlds. It’s a grand-scale space opera with a focus on narrative and discovery.
18. Machi Koro Legacy
Here's more proof that legacy games can be bright and cheerful! Machi Koro Legacy takes the simple, dice-rolling city-building fun of the original game and turns it into a 10-game campaign filled with delightful surprises.
You're competing to be the first to build a set of landmarks, but a mysterious, magical island has appeared, and its story unfolds as you play. Each game introduces new mechanics, new cards, and fun twists that keep the simple formula feeling fresh and exciting. It’s a fantastic "next step" for families who have enjoyed My City.
19. Vampire: The Masquerade – CHAPTERS
This is an RPG in a box. CHAPTERS delivers a massive, story-driven campaign set in the popular World of Darkness. You'll create a fledgling vampire and navigate the treacherous, modern-day Montreal, engaging in dialogue, solving investigations, and getting into brutal combat.
The game uses storybooks and branching narratives to create a deeply immersive experience where your choices truly matter. It’s a very mature game that tackles complex themes, but for fans of role-playing and deep narratives, it offers an unparalleled solo or co-op experience that feels like a high-production video game on your tabletop.
20. Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West
Taking one of the most beloved gateway games of all time and giving it the legacy treatment was a bold move, and it paid off beautifully. Ticket to Ride Legacy has you and your friends embarking on a 12-game campaign, pioneering your way across North America as you build your rail empire.
You'll start on a small map of the East Coast, but as you play, you'll unlock new regions of the board, add new rules, and fill your personal vault with new abilities and cards. The core "collect sets, claim routes" gameplay is still there, but it's enhanced by a charming story and a wonderful sense of progression. It’s the perfect way to introduce your family and friends to the magic of legacy board games.
Legacy games offer an experience that no other form of entertainment can replicate. They are the ultimate fusion of gameplay and storytelling, creating a shared narrative that is entirely your own. The memories you'll make—the shocking reveals, the narrow victories, the devastating losses—will stick with your group for years to come. So gather your friends, pick a universe to get lost in, and prepare for your next great obsession.
Which legacy game are you most excited to try? Have you played any on this list and have an epic story to share? Let us know in the comments below
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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