Charterstone

After Risk Legacy, we tried Charterstone.

The legacy story of Charterstone is that the players have been given a charter by the Forever King to "build me a village worthy of Greengully" ... or something like that.  Players assign their meeples to buildings in order to gather resources, construct buildings, and complete various tasks.  Conceptually, it's not that radically different from Lords of Waterdeep, I guess, which is well-liked by the family, so looking good?

The pieces are nice and the boxes for keeping your pieces from one game to the next are well-designed.

The board is charming and well-organized:

Zooming in on the upper left of the map, there's the Cloud Port, which is a shared spot for all players.  Shipping goods out via the Cloud Port scores you points.  There's also my territory.  Since I won the first game, the rest of my family got to name it.  Hence, I am the proud leader of "Noobland".  

Noobland focuses on clay as a resource, so my personas' names are all about clay.  You choose a persona to play at the start of each game, and it gives you a special ability.  You eventually get a companion who stays with you across all the games, and because mine once tried to kill the Forever King, she naturally had to be named Celaena Sardothien...  Guests can also visit your territory, and while you can keep some of them from one game to the next, they are more temporary.  

Zooming in on the upper right of the map, there's the reputation track, which is another way to score points.  I really like it when there are multiple ways to win, and you work with what chance brings you.  The upper right is also the home of "Sylvania".

Sylvania is all about harvesting wood from the forests (hence Lilah's "the Destroyer" moniker???). Lilah's companion is Lulu, and they're so adorable with their similar names that they're now a couple.

Zooming in on the lower left of the map, there's the progress track that marks when the game ends.  It's also the home of "Totally Poland", a territory that was not actively run by someone in our family of 4 (you can have up to 6 players in Charterstone).

The lower right of the map has "Champs", another territory not actively run by a player.  It's been long enough that I forget how we began to be able to develop these territories.  It's possible that we misunderstood something in the rules (a common issue we've had in legacy games; it's a challenge because the rules change as the game evolves).

The bottom center of the map has the "Soviet Cat Union".

They're all coal miner's daughters here, and suspicious of outsiders like Comrade Jeb and his outlandish stories. Back to the mines with you, Jeb!

The top center of the map has "The Empire". It's all about farming. You can also see the top part of "The Commons", which has a number of spaces for scoring victory points.

The leader of The Empire truly is an evil mastermind who can't trust anyone, especially not a companion who has been spying on them.

It turned out that while I like a cozy, resource-gathering, town-building game, the rest of my family does not; or at least they didn't enjoy this variant on that style of game.  We got through 8 games before The Empire broke the campaign with some economy gremlining and we quit.