Conclusions

Neither the original version nor the Avalon-Hill version of Legionnaire was a great game. Like all of my games, it had a great many clever ideas, but clever ideas don't ensure great designs. The games were certainly competently designed and executed; nobody had any complaints. The reviews of the games were uniformly positive. Certainly by the standards of the day, both versions of Legionnaire were of better quality than most of the competition. Both games played rather like a thinking man's arcade game. I'm not ashamed of the overall results; I did a good job with both of these designs. But there was no lightning bolt of genius in the design; I never felt any passion for it. Every creative person must grind out a great many works, some of which will be turkeys, some of which will be merely competent, and a few of which will be masterpieces. Legionnaire was no turkey, but it was certainly no masterpiece. It was good experience for me, but I would have spent my time better had I moved on to something that fired my imagination.