Sharpie Cube is the hot new format where players deface cards to make them better.
Back in 2011, Risk Legacy shook the staid little world of board games with its anarchic approach to the sanctity of playing pieces. It was a game designed to be customized in play—after a few sessions you’d have written new names on the board, ripped up cards and thrown them away, added new rules, and permanently altered it in ways that made each copy unique to your gaming group.
While the immediate reaction included a lot of forum threads about how to play Risk Legacy without permanently changing things so you could reset it to zero at the end, in the long run the joy of vandalism won out. It inspired an entire subgenre of board games like Pandemic Legacy and Betrayal Legacy that demand you treat them like an underpass begging for graffiti.
In Magic: The Gathering, where the collector market considers cards to be investments it’s frankly barbaric to play an actual game with, the equivalent is an unofficial format called Sharpie Cube, or Redacted Cube.
