My wife and I are always desperate to find things to do during the ridiculously-long stretch over the holidays when the kids are out of school for the Christmas-to-New-Year’s period. Recently, that stretch lasted 17 days.
So, my wife often buys 2-3 activities—art projects, workbooks, LEGO installations, board games—to help pave the way in-between all the TV watching, tablet gaming, meals, and sleep. (Sadly, that is often all my kids do during that time if we are at home!) One of the activities she picked up this year was the cooperative legacy board game Ziggurat, published by one of our family’s favorite activity makers, the puzzle company Mindware.
At first, I rolled my eyes at this one. Do I not bring in enough board games for this family to play every year? But then I noticed the names on the box: Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock, two of the legends of the genre and the creators of the greatest legacy game of them all, Pandemic: Legacy Season 1. Then I flipped the box over and fell even harder in love with the concept—Ziggurat is a six-chapter legacy game and looked like a great time for the kids.
I was mostly right.
Stick Rule D Here After Completing Chapter 5
Ziggurat is a cooperative legacy game for 2-4 players. Like other legacy titles, the rules for Ziggurat evolve over the course of a series of chapters—in this case, six—by asking players to permanently update the rulebook with new game effects, as players discover the mysteries of the Ziggurat, an ancient temple crumbling near the outskirts of a town that is slowly losing its population every year.
The game’s main mechanic features players managing a hand of just a single card per player, using those cards to move both players (individually or each member of the party) as well as fire spirits, the main baddies that must be avoided by players on their way up the pyramid in each chapter. Along the way, players must try to move to the top of the five-level pyramid using a series of chutes and ladders placed around the Ziggurat. Once all players reach the top, the chapter ends…and in successive chapters, rules slowly change the win condition with minor changes here and there.
There’s a bit more to it than that, but not really. In many ways, that was refreshing to me as a story-light experience, coming off text-heavy legacy adventures like Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporation—Darkest Magic, a title I worked through last summer. In Ziggurat, each chapter’s intro is roughly a paragraph, then players are given new rules and all they need to make another run up the Ziggurat. Along the way, players can earn one of four “Honorifics” in a round if they are the first (or sometimes, last) person to achieve a feat tied to that round’s new rule conditions.
And this story- and rules-light adventure makes it exceptionally easy to get Ziggurat to the table over and over again. We needed 10 plays to work through the six chapters; strangely, we needed three plays to get through the first chapter, then only one replayed chapter the rest of the way. Working together and understanding the upcoming chain of cards held by each player is the main key to winning, and after we had that down, Ziggurat actually turned out to be quite easy.
But a couple of things made this a fun jaunt for the family. The ways rules evolve here was satisfying without including too many sizable jumps in complexity. The base game is simple, and each new chapter brought only minor changes to the game state. Next, the chapters are pretty short…as fast as 20 minutes, as long as 45. We did one chapter each night for a week, so save for the first chapter’s roughly 90-minute playtime (since we needed three tries), we were always done in about an hour.
The Honorifics ended up being the thing the kids chased down the most, so for them, it wasn’t always about winning…it was usually more about getting the fun titles that can be earned for various achievements in the game. I could see that being the thing for younger children too, so that made for some good times. (Other legacy games, such as Wandering Galaxy: A Crossroads Game, do similar things to keep hooks in the players to constantly chase memorable moments.)
Should YOU Get Ziggy With It?
The main complaints for Ziggurat came from the adults. My wife and I played both Pandemic: Legacy Season 1 as well as Season 2…and I’ll just politely say that those earlier games are the better titles. Now, certainly that comes with a major asterisk: Ziggurat is a very light, family-weight legacy game, with tension tied mainly to learning whether players will have the right card combinations to move their adventurers up and out of the Ziggurat each chapter. The Pandemic games have real drama, longer story arcs, and difficulty that really spikes by the end.
In that way, the losing conditions—when any player falls into a pit or is destroyed by a fire spirit, allowing a fire spirit to advance to the final ladder, or when the draw deck runs out—are somewhat easy to avoid, so the puzzle becomes a how question, not an if question. (We breezed through Chapters 5 and 6, and I don’t think it was because we were suddenly Ziggurat experts.) That left me with a somewhat empty feeling about the overall experience, even as I watched the kids high-five each other for claiming a bunch of Honorifics.
I think this all means the Ziggurat experience ended at just the right time. We have a number of Leacock and/or Daviau titles in the house, from Forbidden Island to Thunder Road: Vendetta to the Crossbows & Catapults remake. As games, we preferred all of those titles to Ziggurat. But as an activity to fill some time over the holidays, Ziggurat wasn’t bad. For players looking for their first legacy experience, Ziggurat is an excellent way to jump into the pool before graduating to stronger fare like Risk: Legacy, Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West, or the Clank! Legacy titles.
Ziggurat details
- Designer: Matt Leacock, Rob Daviau
- Artists: Cory Godbey
- Publishers: MindWare, Schmidt Spiele
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 2 - 4
- Age range : 8+
- Time range : 45 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Cooperative Game, Legacy Game, Modular Board, Scenario / Mission / Campaign Game, Three Dimensional Movement
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.11616 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Ziggurat.
