I recently acquired The Sims 3. A friend of mine then introduced me to the Sims Legacy Challenge, which was originally conceptualized for The Sims 2. The goal is to start a new game with one impoverished Sim owning a large plot of land with no house on it and see how awesome you can make his (or her) family by the birth of the tenth generation.
Only the founding Sim is created through Create-a-Sim; he and all his descendants must mate with non-player-created Sims. Like a royal family, there must be a blood-related heir to the position of head of household. Any Sims moved out of the household cease to be active members of the bloodline and no longer contribute to the success of the family. No Sims are allowed to return to the nest, and the challenge ends prematurely if the head of household dies heirless.
The part that makes this a real challenge is that all Sims born into the household must have all of their personality traits assigned randomly, even if the game gives the player the option to choose. If your heir is insane, hates children, and just wants to sit on the couch all day… well, you can try for baby again and hope for a better Sim or you can make it work.
The challenge’s creator, dubbed Pinstar1161 on EA’s official Sims forums, has set up a scoring method for the Legacy Challenge for both The Sims 2 and The Sims 3. Beyond birthing a tenth generation and building a wicked and expensive house, success in the challenge is measured by things like fulfilling your Sims’ goals (major and minor) in life and keeping portraits of your Sims after their deaths.
Full rules for the Sims 2 Legacy Challenge can be found at the Legacy Challenge web site; rules for the Sims 3 Legacy Challenge haven’t been added there yet, but can be read in a thread on EA’s Sims 3 forums.
Now, you may note, as I did, that while Pinstar has done an excellent job of writing the rules out in a detailed and thorough manner, he has chosen not to make a plain ol’ scorecard for the Legacy Challenge.
Multiple someones have made scorecards for the Sims 2 Legacy Challenge at different points in time, reflecting changes made to the Legacy Challenge for different expansions. A fellow going by RSKehrer at the official Sims 3 forums has made a printable scorecard for the Sims 3 Legacy Challenge and shared it with the community.
I live my life without a printer and am psychotic about papers getting wrinkles in them (which is likely to happen if I leave a paper scorecard by my computer), so I decided to make an Excel spreadsheet scorecard for the Sims 3 Legacy Challenge. In addition to remaining wrinkle-free, it does all the point calculations for me and can be reused again and again for multiple Legacy Challenge games.
The spreadsheet can be downloaded via Google Documents. (Link is good as of April 18, 2019.) It is an .xls file with no macros in it. Although I crafted it in Office 2007, it uses only basic formulas, so there shouldn’t be any compatibility issues with older versions of Office or with OpenOffice. If you do have any problems, please let me know by leaving a comment.