Pandemic Legacy creators reunite for a new co-op legacy adventure board game

The creators of the acclaimed Pandemic Legacy trilogy of evolving, campaign-based board games are teaming up again in a brand new co-op legacy game releasing later this year.

Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau’s Ziggurat looks to be a lighter, more family-friendly experience than their celebrated - and increasingly ambitious - post-apocalyptic spin-offs from Leacock’s intense disease-fighting co-op series.

The upcoming board game casts two to four players as both human and anthropomorphic animal heroes tasked by their village elders with venturing into the titular centuries-old structure, now crumbling, drained of colour by the elements, and reclaimed by nature’s vines. Illustrating the heroic volunteers with the rest of the game will be artist Cory Godbey.

Six chapters, each lasting between 20 and 40 minutes, will gradually reveal the history and mystery of the Ziggurat, which was once said to be the home of a dragon in centuries past and is now rumoured to be inhabited by fire spirits.

Like the designers’ other legacy games, each successive chapter will permanently alter the game’s rules, components and 3D board made of stacked layers of the ziggurat, with the players’ decisions influencing the possible outcomes read from a separate storybook. Upon completion of the campaign, Ziggurat will remain endlessly playable, similar to more recent legacy games such as Daviau’s adaptation of Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West.

Although ostensibly an original legacy game, Ziggurat appears to be at least somewhat based on Leacock’s 2017 family sci-fi game Mole Rats in Space, in which players’ mole rats raced around a research station to collect equipment and escape while avoiding the deadly bite of poisonous snakes - which could be ejected into space. (Well spotted, BoardGameGeek.)

Ziggurat is planned for a release in September 2024 by publisher MindWare, with a price yet to be confirmed.