Review Details

Charterstone

Product Review (submitted on October 10, 2018):

Charterstone is a cute, fun legacy game that is a very good introduction to legacy games if you are interested in those. For me it was the perfect introduction to this style of game as I had been reading all kinds of great things about other legacy games such as Pandemic Legacy and Gloomhaven. The initial thought was, “good lord play a game once and be done with it?!” That’s crazy talk…..or so I thought.

Got Charterstone and played through it with my wife and we both were instantly drawn in. The legacy aspect is sooooooo much fun. The game plays like a basic worker placement game where you place down a little guy on a particular spot on the game board to collect resources with which to pay for other things in the game. I love worker placement games as well so that was a nice base for the game. Well as the game progresses you will draw cards that have stickers on them of new places to visit on the game board. Pay the required amount of resources and you can stick the sticker on the game board that really opens up the area of play of new ways to place your character.

There are 12 games that can be played until the game ends completely and each game takes progressively longer as you are adding more and more to the board. For a 2 player game it took about an hour for the first game and each game after that took a little over an hour but never longer than 2 hours. At the onset of each individual game there is a card that details a certain objective, the person that achieves said objective gets the honor of scratching off the card to reveal what reward is underneath (like a lottery scratchers ticket). This will then lead into the next game and how the overall story progresses. As far as the story goes it’s not bad, not the best story in the world but interesting and kid friendly. Not going to spoil anything though.

So you are thinking, “well what do I do with this after we finish the 12 games?” One really cool thing about this particular legacy game is that once you complete the legacy portion of the game there are rules to where you can keep playing the game without the legacy aspect! No 2 peoples games will be the same as the end product once you are done will be shaped by your choices throughout the game. If you really want to play through the legacy portion of the game again, they sell a recharge pack that has all the stickers and components to do just that. Also the reverse side of the board is the exact same so you can just flip the board and do it all over which is cool.

Here’s the thing, I think the game would play WAYYYY better with more than 2 people playing. With only 2 people there is so much board to play on and we never did fill it up which lead to missed chances as far as story sequences and things go. At the end of our 2 player campaign there were a TON of cards left in the box that we never touched. You can get up to 6 players around the board and personally I think that would make a more fulfilling game.

In any case if you are wanting a nice light legacy game to see if you would like that style, this is it. Since playing this game I have went on and bought Gloomhaven which I love even more. Charterstone is a very simple to learn, kid friendly, legacy style board game.