Let's Talk Talisman

Ok, with the announcement of the newest expansion now is as good a time as any to talk up my favorite adventure game. This isn't going to be a review or anything, but how I play the game and thoughts on the expansions.

Gameplay - I always play with the following rules:

• Alignment based teams - either two teams of two/three (good vs evil), or three teams of two (good vs neutral vs evil). Toss all cards that switch alignment.
• Movement - Pick a direction first, then roll the die. Characters can stop anywhere on their chosen path within the die roll. Also, if a 6 is rolled, then the character can move to the same space as a teammate if they are in the same region.
• Talismans - No talismans laying in fields. All talismans removed from the adventure deck. Talismans are gained from Warlock quests, either randomly chosen prior to play or are given when landing on the warlock space.
• Advancements - 5 trophies will do instead of 7.
• Adventure Cards - Keep the monster ratio high for trophies to keep the game advancing. I toss several of the non-monster cards.
• Character Selection - Someone just posted on BGG that they randomly choose characters, but a player can select another random character at the cost of one Fate point. I like this and plan to try it in the future.

The Minis - I'm a 20+ years minis painter. To me the Talisman minis are some of the absolute worst I've ever put on a table. The scale is all over the place (dwarf bigger than the troll, and that's before the increasingly smaller scale of later expansions) and the sculpt and plastic softness are a pain to paint. I tossed 'em. It may be an OCD thing, but I couldn't play with those minis. Plus, you really don't need'em. For a game like this pawns are fine...in fact perfect. Tossing out all the minis meant my core box has tons of room. All the mini expansions fit with plenty of room to spare! I've got 12 pawns I use (6 colors for players, black for reaper, brown for the upcoming werewolf, and 4 green frogs) that take up next to no room and are suitable for any character chosen. That, and they give the game even more of an old school feel... like playing in the early 80s when pawns were the norm. I'm thinking about even moving to more basic looking pawns as these have a slight 'meeple' look, but work fine.

(Flanked by Death and the Werewolf)


(It may be 'de-pimping' the game, but look at all that room in the box - mini expansions included)


Mini Expansions - These are the best bang for the buck, with the Reaper being the absolute best expansion for any game ever. I never play Talisman without Death...yeah, he may not always land on someone, but he herds the characters around causing more pvp. If you only ever bought the base game and the Reaper, you'd be good to go. The other two are ok. Having some new characters is nice. I don't incorporate all of the new spells as I like the spell deck to be smaller so there's more familiarity and more psychology at play. Too many spells, and it's just to random. The Blood Moon thing sounds a little like a Reaper retread, but the day and night feature sounds like the type of variant I like in Talisman, simple to execute. I also wish FFG would toss the crappy gumball minis ((C) Michael Barnes) so they could save on cost and pass that on or better we could get more characters. Three is a little bit of a let down.

Maxi Expansions - Not really a fan. They're mainly just more spaces to land and flip cards on. There are plenty of those on the base boards. The wealth of new characters is nice, but again, I like pvp in my Talisman and these regions simply spread the characters out and the game becomes multi-player solitaire. I usually never play the corner boards with the base and only use the corner boards in one of two ways:

• Quick and Dirty Talisman - Throw down only the Dungeon board, grab a few characters, and race through the dungeon to see who can kill the Lord of Drakness. Same with the Highlands.
• Campaign Talisman - Play the Dungeon or Highland boards with alignment based teams. Winning team characters each get a non talisman (tossed) treasure card. All other cards and stats reset. Then, we play the base game with the team that won the mini board having the treasure card(s) advantage.

The Dragon Expansion I don't have, have never played, and don't plan on picking up. It looks like the type of variant I _don't_ like for Talisman. Fiddly. The characters don't intrigue me either so I see no need to pick this one up. Perhaps someone else can speak to its virtues.

In Summary - Talisman has a lot of warts and there are several decisions (only two female characters in the base game and none in Frostmarch?) that I'm not thrilled about, but the game is a near 10 for me. Some of my favorite gaming sessions have been with this new edition. Even today, at 37, when I'm playing Talisman in the garage while listening to the local hard rock station on the radio, I feel like I'm 13 again. No other game gives me that feeling.

I want an adventure game. It's this, Runebound, or WoW TAG. I think Runebound is right out for taking too damn long.

"Back in The Day" when Talisman was pretty much the only fantasy adventure board game around, me and my buddies played it a lot. A LOT. We were familiar enough with the game that we began to become frustrated with the imbalance of some of the characters and the nonsensical interaction of some of the cards. I recently came upon this document. It must be about 20 years old. Some of this was fixed in the newest version, some was not. Somewhere there is a brittle old piece of paper with these rules signed by myself and my gaming buds from the "before time". I especially like Adventure Card Modification #7.

TALISMAN CLARIFICATIONS

Character Modifications and Clarifications:

1.The Archeologist can keep enemies shot by the pistol for strength.
2.The Centaur adds only one die to his movement, saves Enemies killed by his bow for strength, cannot shoot at Strangers and cannot get other centaurs as followers.
3.The Cyborg loses his movement power.
4.The Highlander’s extra move is made in lieu of encountering the space he landed on.
5.The Inquisitor doesn’t have to choose his alignment until it has an effect on play.
6.The Monk may only add his craft to strength when Attacking, and not when Attacked by, a Character or an Enemy.
7.The Philosopher loses his movement power, and cannot use the “extra spell” power with auto-spell.
8.The Prophetess loses her auto-spell power.
9.The Samurai keeps Enemies defeated by the Bow for Strength.
10.The Sorceress cannot take followers from other Characters.
11.The Space Marine keeps Enemies defeated by the Bolt Gun for Strength.
12.The Swashbuckler must encounter both cards drawn on Fields spaces.
13.The Swordsman can disarm his opponent even if he has no sword, but cannot parry without a sword.
14.The Thief Steals like the Saracen Kidnaps: he must roll the number of objects or less on one die, in order to choose which item he wants from his target. He can, however, simply Steal a bag of gold if he wants.
15.The Valkyrie can save Resurrected human Enemies (and the plus one strength they give her) for the combat of her choice.
16.The Woodsman is +3 with the Poweraxe, not +2.

Adventure Card Modifications and Clarifications:

1.If a character’s movement ends on a Dungeon Doorway, the character may move directly into the Dungeon on the next turn. Also, a character may enter into one Doorway, and exit through another.
2.The Doppleganger may not be saved for strength points, and may not be sucked into the Staff of Mastery.
3.The Orb may be used to negate an Adventure Card just drawn; discard the Orb and said Adventure Card and draw a new Adventure Card.
4.The Warhorse may only be used once, and then must be placed on the discard pile.
5.Enemies sucked into the Staff of Mastery may not be saved for strength.
6.A mule may carry a maximum of 8 objects (don’t forget a mule counts as an object itself).
7.Excessive wand use is cause for censure.
8.A Horse and Cart does not add one to movement, but does hold an infinite number of objects.
9.The Prince or Princess will prevent you from becoming a Toad due to a Random spell or if you draw the Witch (but not if you subsequently land on the Witch).
10.If the Chinese Dragon attacks you using Strength (because it is your weaker attribute) you may save it for Strength points. If the Chinese Dragon attacks you using Craft, it may not be saved, unless your power allows you to save cards for Craft points.
11.A Character may decide not to use a Warp Belt for any given move.
12.A Character encountering the Leper must roll for himself and for each follower.
13.The Hag will not cause you to discard the Jester.
14.Becoming a Toad will cause you to lose the Jester, Hag and/or Poltergeist (because they don’t pay attention to a Toad) and wait for the next player to land on that space.
15.The Band of Zombies, if defeated, count as 8 points towards Strength, and the Space Orks, if defeated, count as 16 points towards Strength.
16.Broken items are declared instead to be Warp Gates, that will remain for 1 round or until a character enters, whichever occurs first.
17.As a Toad, you may accept a ride from the Centaur or Pegasus.
18.The Ranger does not have to roll for Followers in the Chasm.

Dang, Al! That's some serious dedication to Talisman.

Yeah, we LIVED there for a while before the commute got to be too much.

Before I traded my almost-complete 2nd Ed. set, I had compiled a document that had some similar clarifications as Al's but that also tracked the number of wins per character and whether said character was randomly drawn or picked.

Far and away, the most powerful character was the Chaos Warrior. Having good STR to start and then getting a gift from the gods for every kill just made him the runaway leader. Until we relegated him to "random draw games only", he was an auto-choice. Of course, we had also instituted a rule that stated that you always had to play something different if we were picking, rather than drawing.

We restrained the Monk's ability to offense, as well, as he was the second-most powerful. Of course, we also played that you could gain Craft in the samw way as Strength (7 points) because there were too many instances of serious advantage for STR-based characters and we thought it was kind of ridiculous to hope for 3 or 4 cards in the massive Adventure deck to come up in order to advance a main stat that was often essential in winning the game, especially if the Demon Lord showed up.

Third in wins/picks was the Troll, because anyone who played him rushed for the City as soon as they had any magic item except the Runesword, so that they could turn it in and become the Arch-Mage with an already fantastic strength. That sequence of events was the source of one of my favorite games:

We allowed people to start another character if they died. If it was late enough in the game, people usually didn't bother, but early on it was nice to be able to stay in and try to compete. So, my friend, Joe, who was obsessed with beating me at Talisman (I had the most wins in our group; geek pride!), picked the Troll, found the Ancient Artifact, became the Arch-Mage and started laying waste to the board. I had died early on with the Woodsman (I think) and had re-started with the Leprechaun. There were 3 other people in the game with no one nearly as powerful as Joe, so I kept telling him that he should just hunt people down and win by default. He kept saying: "No! No! I want to win it straight!"

So, I annoyed him for a while by tossing Hex spells on the Portal of Power as the other three players got killed off and it was just the two of us. I kept on with normal adventuring while he went through the upper level, smashing aside the threats and advancing inevitably... to the Horrible, Black Void. Guess who's the last player on the board?! Lucky Charms, bitch!

Obviously, we didn't let people use the Void to travel to the Timescape. We also played the Dungeon as an automatic Talisman, as it otherwise wasn't at all worth it to go in unless you were already primed to advance to the Portal. Wish I knew where I'd put that record...

We just plain stopped playing with the City Expansion. It was incredibly annoying in so many ways, and also made every game end with people playing the Master Level characters which is BORING!

stormseeker75 wrote: I want an adventure game. It's this, Runebound, or WoW TAG. I think Runebound is right out for taking too damn long.

Apples and oranges and Blood for the Blood God!

MattLoter wrote:

stormseeker75 wrote: I want an adventure game. It's this, Runebound, or WoW TAG. I think Runebound is right out for taking too damn long.

Apples and oranges and Blood for the Blood God!

What Matt said! I think...

I've never played WoW: TAG so I'm not a great source, but I'd pick Runebound, regardless, if only for the ridiculous current variety. With just a couple of the small expansions (I'd suggest Scepter of Kyros and Cult of the Rune), you can play the same game three different ways. Of course, if you have the coin to drop, you can also play no less than 4 different maps (4 big expansions) and another 4 alternate stories (4 more small expansions), in addition to adding new items, allies, monsters, and character decks if you're into more PvP.

These are different things we've done over the years to shorten the game:

Points:
1. 5 or 3 trophies for stat increases.
2. Trade in trophies for stats at any time except combat, even if it’s not your turn (something to do while awaiting your turn.
3. You can turn in 3 items for a craft or strength.
4. You can trade a relic (Highland expansion) for a craft or strength.
5. You can trade Quest Reward cards for craft or strength (Sacred Pool expansion).

Equipment:
1. You can trade items with other players when on the same space.
2. You can trade items with other players, even when not on the same space.*
3. You can trade followers.*
*We never use these rules.

Movement:
1. Use Fate tokens to adjust movement rolls (one token per additional movement).
2. Option to move one space instead of rolling for movement (even a toad can move one space).
3. Don’t roll for movement, all characters have a movement score set at 2, 3 or there starting Strength or Craft.
4. Roll 2 dice for movement, choose which one to use.
5. You may move UP TO your movement roll (i.e. roll a 4, you can move 1, 2, 3 or 4 spaces).

Combat:
1. Assign another player your nemesis. Your nemesis always rolls your monster rolls.
2. Bring in another set of dice as monster dice, and roll your monster and hero dice at the same time.
3. All 6’s are critical hits. If both the hero and monster roll 6’s, it is a push.
4. All 1’s are critical fails, and automatically lose the battle. If both the hero and monster roll 1’s, it is a push.
5. Switch to a d10.

Obtaining a Talisman:
1. Start everyone with 1, 2 or 3 Warlock Quest cards. When the last one is completed, the player receives a Talisman.
2. If you confront the Eagle King or Lord of Darkness in the Eyrie or Treasure Room, in the Highland or Dungeon expansions, win or lose, you steal a Talisman.

Entering the Middle Region:
1. Earning a Talisman automatically teleports you to the sentinel space.
2. Earning a Talisman automatically teleports you to the Warlock’s Cave.
3. Win or lose, you always pass the sentinel on your next turn.

Characters and Teams:
1. Every player receives 3 or 5 hero cards. This is their team. They choose which hero they put in first, and the rest are reserves. When a hero dies, they are replaced by the next reserve hero of their choice. The hero retains the Strength, Craft and Life bonuses of their predecessor. Equipment and followers are left on the space the original hero died (first player to get there can take them). Spells from the previous hero are discarded. In a 2 or 3 player game, distribute the heroes by alignment.
2. Team play: with 2, 4 or 6 players, divide the characters into good and evil. Players with the same alignments are on teams. They can trade equipment, gold and followers when they are in the same area. You can only fight other players who are on opposing teams. Only one Talisman is needed for the entire team. Either discard the alignment change cards, or allow players to switch teams if their alignment is changed. With 3 or 6 players, make a neutral team.

Ending Conditions:
1. Game ends when the Crown of command is reached. Period.
2. Insert any or all of the alternate endings from expansions.

The last couple games, we played good vs. evil teams, and everyone started with 3 Warlock Quests. Complete all 3 and you get the Talisman, and when you get to the Crown, you have to defeat one of the 3 main baddies.

I've played both 4th and 2nd edition (i think it was 2nd could have been 1st).

I quite like this game, works best with players that are trying to win, rather than just tkaing repeated dumb risks. Alot of my games involve at least one player that just repeatadly gets turned into a frog.

Its not a particularly smart game, but works well for people who want simplicity and some adventuring.

I haven't played Talisman enough to have experimented with house rules. The only comment I have is that I love Talisman and this thread is brimming with awesome.

Thank you for the offer. I'm going to try to get my options sorted out by Friday so I will let you know if I'm actually making my special guest appearance.