Charterstone Chronicle, Game 12, & Reflections

IT’S OVER. MY 9 MONTH LEGACY GAME PURGATORY IS OVER.

I’m just kidding.

Well, not really.

I’ve said before I think Charterstone is a lot of good ideas with less than stellar execution, and the end of our campaign did little to change that.

Before I go into more detail with that though, Game 12!

Final Standings

1^st (The Infinity King) – Daniel

2^nd – Megan

3^rd – Caralee

4^th – Dave

5^th – Danielle

6^th – Amanda

Nothing as memorable as the infinite loop happened in the last game, and it was mercifully shorter. 

We elected a new mayor, finished the story, and set the game up to be replayed on the town we built.

The most notable thing that happened was Amanda scored a monster 13 points in one turn, the highest we've had (well, excluding infinite points XD).

So, let’s start with the good, because in fairness there is a lot of good stuff here:

1. The components are all well designed and have that premium feel to them, A+

2. Each charter has a very coherent sense of theming. Additionally, I really love the graphic design for many of the buildings, fairly accurately conveying across the board what it does.

3. I thought that being able to use buildings outside your Charter would be too strong and efface much of the benefit of a well-designed home Charter, but the game did a good job of balancing that out and making it equally worthwhile to use your own Charter even if your rivals have quality buildings.

4.  I loved the way that the personas shaped gameplay, and thought they were a pretty good addition to the game (although I think you should have been hard capped at 2 personas max to reduce mental load).

5.  The Sky Islands were another rather inspired feature to add some variety between games and presented some interesting cost/benefit trades (Do I place this empty sky island to get the most out of a build slot but deny myself the building under it for the first part of the game?)

6.  I for the most part loved the glory system of getting to choose new bonuses to acquire as the game went on, and it was really interesting to see what people prioritized.

With those nice things said, I’m now going to lay into the shortcomings of this game. Fair warning, this is going to include a lot of comparing Charterstone to other Legacy style games. It’s in the comparison that the big problems emerge:  

1. Feature creep. If you have a Legacy Game, you gradually add in features and systems to give the game a sense of progression. In this way, the game gradually grows more complex. This becomes a problem when there are so many features that they put a high mental load on players and force them to track multiple moving parts constantly. You have to cut off the creep somewhere before players are overburdened, and Charterstone does not succeed in this. The final game feels very bloated. The most egregious example of this is the income round. Great concept, but in practice we all dreaded trying to execute the increasingly complex income rounds, collecting not only for guests but for the innumerable income buildings on the board.

2. Unbalanced game elements. I could go at length at this, but the game suffers from elements that are disproportionately strong compared to others. First and foremost, advancement cards are extremely good – especially visitors and treasures. For this reason, Robots are disproportionately strong. By the end of the game, it felt pretty clear that some Charters were far stronger than others. Blue and Red in particular benefited by having the best minions by a long-shot, and black from having the best single building in the game (the Perfumery). I will give them credit that they tried to balance some of these elements against each other, I just don’t think they did it successfully. However, if I were to make one tiny change to fix the game, I would standardize the markets everyone gets. Purple and Red got the best hands down, because they combo with both of your Charter’s friends. Black and Blue’s were only marginally worse. Green and yellow were completely trash by comparison. Largely because…

3.  No scaling for the middle of the board/rep track. This is such a massive oversight, and by the end the Reputation track was good for little more than being an influence sink. Because of the uselessness of the Town Square as the game progressed, all the assistants basically fell completely out of use (Well, except for Booker). There should have been preset upgrades to these zones in the form of stickers at Game 4 and Game 8. 

4. Not play-tested enough. The fact that Daniel scored infinite points should make this clear. There were clearly some game elements that were not thoroughly tested, and I’m left thinking they just didn’t get a lot of late campaign testing in. This really shows in the game length, the late campaign is an unbearable grind with your general lack of Charterstones and Buildings to advance the progress track. You can’t tell me that our group was singularly quick at building everything, this just reeks of not being tested enough.

5. Underutilized game elements. This critique may seem strange in light of my first critique of feature creep. But truly, a couple of the game elements felt really underdeveloped compared to some of the others. Notable here are the Perils. As a rule, the peril type rarely mattered. I actually loved the game where there was an end-game penalty to anyone who collected a fuel shortage peril, because it introduced some meaningful variety and made you care more about the colors. The peril cash out buildings just did not scale hard enough to make it worthwhile to deliberately seek out peril, and the fact that you quickly maxed out peril placement and couldn’t collect a free one at the outset of the game for filling out the glory track was really crummy for people who upgraded it. 

6. Finally, and perhaps the biggest one. The lack of rubber-banding. I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Legacy Games all struggle with this. You need to reward the winner while still creating ways for others to jump back into the campaign. This is a difficult balance to strike. In Seafall for example, they rubberband the game by actively punishing the winning players to that game’s detriment. Charterstone by comparison has essentially no rubber-banding. The last place player gets their large meeple replaced with a ghostie, but this is essentially worthless due to the weakness of Reputation as the game goes on. And…..that’s it. There is essentially no way for the losing players to team together and reign in the leader because of the Euro-style nature of the game. By about game 5/6, you probably know who is going to win and there won’t be much you can do about it. You can’t even really gang up on the leader like you can in Risk: Legacy.

So, where does this leave us? The first few games of Charterstone are fantastic. The world really needed a village building legacy game (with it still being  a few months until Machi Koro: Legacy comes out). The first few games of Charterstone are pretty strong, and the game really flow well. But the late campaign is really underbaked, and exposes the weakness of the overall game. Stonemaier games produces consistently pretty good products, so it’s a shame that I can’t give their first foray into Legacy gaming higher marks.

If you have a more casual play group than us, I think you’re more likely to enjoy the campaign all the way through because you won’t accelerate through the “tech tree” as quickly. Playing with fewer players may also help to that end. For my part, I truly loved the first half or so of this campaign. But as the game times crested 3 hours and the feature bloat really set in, my enjoyment plummeted.

Good concept, less than stellar execution. 5/10.