Year: 2016 | Players: 1-4 | Minutes: 60+ | Ages: 10+
This Sherwood’s Legacy review was made after playing the game five times.
What is Sherwood’s Legacy?
In Sherwood’s Legacy, you and up to three other players play as Robin Hood and his allies, attempting to protect a village in Sherwood’s Forest and eventually take down the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Sherwood’s Legacy was created by Thomas M. Gofton, Aron Murch, and Cameron Parkinson, and published by Lynnvander Productions and Jasco Games.
Sherwood’s Legacy Gameplay
To begin a game of Sherwood’s Legacy, you’ll set up the tiles in a certain way based on the number of players. Everyone will get a character sheet, which tells you the starting item you’ll have and the special ability you’ll be able to use throughout the game.
On your turn, you’ll be able to move up to four spaces and use up to three actions. Your actions include fighting enemies, moving your villagers, and using the Trading Post to make equipment and build structures.
Fighting enemies is extremely simple to understand. If you have a weapon, you look at its range and you use an action to either wound or kill the enemy. The downside to killing a lot of enemies is that it causes your bounty to go up, making certain actions a bit more difficult.
You’ll be moving villagers around to add resources to the Town Hall and to man the watchtowers you can build throughout the game. There are resource camps all over the forest that contain wood, metal, gold, and stone. Those resources can be collected by the villagers and can be used to build multiple items that can help your team.
Once everyone has taken a turn, the Threat Phase takes place. The first thing you’ll do is draw a card to see where the new enemies are going to spawn. After that, all of the enemies on the board will move and possibly attack. There are four types of enemies: witches, archers, footsoldiers, and knights. Each enemy type has a specific movement speed and objective.
At the end of each round, you’ll add a resource to all camps that currently have a villager on them. Then you’ll light a Flame of Hope, which tells you how many rounds you’ve played. During the third, sixth, and ninth rounds, a Doom Card is flipped, making the rest of the game a bit more difficult.
If you’re able to make it through 10 rounds, the Sheriff of Nottingham shows up. If you can defeat him, everyone wins! You’ll lose the game if the enemies are able to retire half of the characters, kill three of the villagers, or if they raze three village tiles.
Check out Sherwood’s Legacy at Amazon
Pros
- Probably the best thing about Sherwood’s Legacy is the flow of play. Once everyone knows how to play the game, turns fly by and there really isn’t any downtime.
- The overall look of the game is nice. The Robin Hood theme isn’t extremely strong, but the forest and village tiles do a pretty good job of transporting you into this world. The tokens are also really nice, especially the coins!
- It’s really cool that they included multiple setups in the rulebook based on the number of players. That tells me that they playtested it enough to find the balance for each player count. And that is how it feels, too.
- Everyone seems to like using the Trading Post. You have a ton of great options to choose from, which makes the worker placement part of the game a lot of fun.
- Unlike Albion’s Legacy, Sherwood’s Legacy is very easy to learn and teach. I only had to go through the rulebook once and only had to reference it a couple of times during my first game.
Cons
- Sherwood’s Legacy might be a bit too easy. Your main goal is to keep the enemies under control, and that’s not too hard to do when you can take most of them out pretty much as soon as they hit the board.
- This game probably doesn’t have a ton of replayability. Once you’ve played a few times, nothing really surprises you and it can feel a bit too repetitive. It might be one of those games that needs to sit on the shelf for a while between plays.
- Because every bit of information is public, you can run into issues with alpha gamers taking over. We didn’t have the quarterbacking issue, but it certainly can happen if you have that type of player in your group.
Final Thoughts
I’d put Sherwood’s Legacy in the “try before you buy” category. It’s certainly not a bad game, but it doesn’t stand out from the bunch and it’s not nearly as thematic as I had hoped. That being said, it’s the only cooperative Robin Hood board game out there right now, so I do give the designers credit for making a game with this fantastic theme.
I’m definitely a bigger fan of Albion’s Legacy at this point, but most of the people in my group did have a pretty good time playing Sherwood’s Legacy and we’re all looking forward to playing Neverland’s Legacy (review coming soon)!
Sherwood’s Legacy Links
BGG | Amazon | eBay
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