Rob Daviau is the genius designer behind some of the most innovative and genre-stretching games of the last few years—including Heroscape and Risk: Legacy. Well now that Rob's left Hasbro and branched out on his own, he's teaming up with Plaid Hat Games to announce the newest Legacy design: Seafall.

According to the announcement on Plaid Hat's site, "SeaFall is a 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) set in an age of sail world that is reminiscent of our world. In SeaFall the world is just starting to claw its way out of a dark age and has just begun to rediscover seafaring technology. Players take on the role of a main land empire who each consult with a consortium of advisors to discover new islands, explore those islands, develop trade, send out raiding parties, take part in ship to ship combat, and more...Just as in Risk Legacy, SeaFall will evolve as player play it. Players will become personally invested and the game will remember their grudges. The narrative will swing as players open up the world. Unlike Risk Legacy it does all of this without being tied to the Risk license and gameplay engine. SeaFall will be a medium-heavy weight gamer's hobby game with original game play systems. Expect the epic. The game is slated for release in 2014."

I (Firestone) was able to get on the playtesting team for this, and I'm SUPER excited. Sounds like a blast! Have you played Risk: Legacy yet? What would you like to see in this new game?

Thanks for reading!

According to a report on Game Salute News, Rob Daviau, the design genius behind some of Hasbro's best games—including Heroscape and Risk:Legacy—is leaving Hasbro next month. He'll be starting his own board game design and consultation company called IronWall Games. This is terrible news for Hasbro, but excellent news for the rest of the board game community, as Rob's free to design, unfettered from the constraints surely put on him by a large, for-profit company. (The downside is that he won't have that large company's money to help make some ideas a reality. Something like Heroscape from scratch would be almost impossible, I'd imagine.)