Flashback Friday - Talisman - Love it or Hate It? Do you Still Play It?

I still play it, and, only with the Reaper expansion. It's an old school roll-and-move design. But, this allows social interaction and beer. You can teach it to anybody--most like it. And, it creates great stories! It plays too long, but, I house-rule it to shorten the game by allowing easier level-ups and shortening the end-game at the Crown of Command. I just 3D-printed architectural elements to add to the board and will paint them.

Ah_Pook wrote: For us a lot of the charm comes from the art in 2e. I don't think we would enjoy it nearly as much with modern FFG fantasy art (yknow, competent and bland) or Warhammer 40k themed or whatever.

With the fourth edition, the board is terrific. You can tell that a GW subsidiary made it originally. There's a marked change in the art after the base game toward a less compelling FFG style.

Talisman never really did it for me. I never seem to get the narrative that others do from the game. I just move a dude around to gain xp, items and gold until I can hit the centre.

In most ways it doesn’t have a huge difference than the Bauhaus blowing apart some mutants on some stairs, but it just seems to fall short. I honestly get more tension and narrative from a game of Claustrophobia

I owned 3rd edition way back when in high school in the mid-90s, but never really found anyone to play it with.

I just picked up 4th edition to play with my 5-year-old, and found that I've fallen in love with it and started playing solo games where I control multiple characters. Sure it's random and basically 'dumb', compared to more recent fantasy board game designs. But its very simplicity and stupidity is its genius. It is like a little fantasy world generator, where the random pull of the deck generates a different board each time, with little micro-stories every turn. In my current game the Ruins ended up with both the Cave and the Shrine, making it catnip for every adventurer on the board - until the sneaky Minstrel cast a spell to shift time and space and pull those cards halfway across the board to his location.

Despite all the randomness there is real strategy there, especially with certain characters (Particularly characters who can manipulate movement, peek at decks or redraw cards, or really any spellcaster who gets to refresh spells).

Now I'm looking to acquire all the expansions, which is a very expensive endeavor, unfortunately.

Relic obsoleted Talisman, and then Runebound 3e obsoleted every other adventure game.

I can't agree with that.

Relic might have better mechanics than Talisman in a number of ways, but the aesthetics and theme kill it for me. In Talisman I can adventure in a lighthearted Tolkienesque-fantasy realm with an elf, dwarf, or wizard, battling dragons and searching out lost tombs. In Relic I'm a weird little character bust in a grimdark, low-contrast future of endless war. No thanks.

Runebound 3e was a total bust, IMO. The characters are very samey. Worse, all the enemies also feel pretty much the same. There is no progression from easy to epic threats, no "Ah ha, now I can finally take on that dragon!" And the combat tokens add a huge amount of overhead with no payoff - the decisions are always obvious so why not just have a dice roll off? The co-op expansion was half-assed and failed to address a bunch of cards/abilities that were not designed for co-op. And no allies!

cfmcdonald wrote: I can't agree with that.

Relic might have better mechanics than Talisman in a number of ways, but the aesthetics and theme kill it for me. In Talisman I can adventure in a lighthearted Tolkienesque-fantasy realm with an elf, dwarf, or wizard, battling dragons and searching out lost tombs. In Relic I'm a weird little character bust in a grimdark, low-contrast future of endless war. No thanks.

Runebound 3e was a total bust, IMO. The characters are very samey. Worse, all the enemies also feel pretty much the same. There is no progression from easy to epic threats, no "Ah ha, now I can finally take on that dragon!" And the combat tokens add a huge amount of overhead with no payoff - the decisions are always obvious so why not just have a dice roll off? The co-op expansion was half-assed and failed to address a bunch of cards/abilities that were not designed for co-op. And no allies!

Lol, I can't believe you confirmed every concern I have about Runebound 3e.

But, yeah, Talisman is so effortless, still my favorite game. A story I love to tell is that I bought it after watching Game of Thrones, the unexpectedness of things.

I guess I’m in the “don’t get it” category. Never played it back in the day. Got the app when it came out to see what all the fuss was about. It was confusing and not fun. Deleted it after about 10 minutes. Would rather play about anything else.

I never played it in the day either, doing lots of other shit in the 80s & 90s and games would not have got a look in even if I had bumped into some, and when I got into gaming post 2000 Talisman wasn't a game that I or groups were into.
Even now I wouldn't get it out over any other game in my collection although I would play it if at someone else's place (a couple of Warhammer/RPG guys in my group play it as a replacement if numbers are low at their meets), and I have actually bought the electronic version this year when it was on special but just haven't felt compelled to play it - it's just not part of my history and has no theme/mechanic pull on me either.

dysjunct wrote: I guess I’m in the “don’t get it” category. Never played it back in the day. Got the app when it came out to see what all the fuss was about. It was confusing and not fun. Deleted it after about 10 minutes. Would rather play about anything else.

Even I wouldn't play the app alone. Tried once, deleted it.

My first game of Talisman was in late 2000s? Me and 3 other guys used Vassal to play a 2nd ed Talisman. It was funny as hell, mostly we just laugh at each other. I think that first game took 7 hours over 2 or 3 different sessions. But again, yeah, it's random. Some turns could pass before something happen. But the sense of place... how there can be NPC, new locations... etc, stupid things happening, 2nd turn dragons... that's whack, and that's what I'm playing Talisman for.

Talisman can be lighthearted or blood thirsty; for me I got exposed in the mid/late 80s while an impressionable teen. I don't play it enough now with my kids - but - I had always dreamt of a diorama board and did it a couple of years ago as a fully playable minifig scale based on the 2e game/graphics. Am now working on the City expansion.

Doing this takes it to a new level - my character can pick up the sword, put on the helmet, ride the horse or travel around the board with followers in tow. That added a whole new dimension.

I still play it. It's the best roll-and-move game, period. Roll, move, shit happens, repeat. That's it. The barrier to entry is 0. This is your dude. Don't get killed. Let's go.

We house-rule to have the leveling at 5 instead of 7. It shaves at least an hour off. We play Reaper too, because sometimes you just die.

Yeah that definitely requires pictures, it sounds awesome

Apologies the late reply.

Lego Talisman flickr album

My qualification on this is that as a diorama - it's low level - I was focused on the playability of it all and had spent a while (some better results than others) getting enough characters, followers, strangers/enemies etc plus objects and places all ready to go.

The spaces on the board then - such as a fields space - where half diorama (crops) and half flat space available for game play/resident enemy or place etc plus characters passing through.

This was displayed at Melbourne's Brickvention in Jan 2017. The two trestle tables side by side were uneven enough that a fair bit of set up was spent trying to get it to sit properly - in some shots the 'ripple' in the Storm river is obvious. So - that limited the amount of 'finishing' that I had otherwise planned to do.

So - the 2nd crack at this - under way in the 'lego' man-cave shed down the back yard - - is coming along gradually; the fire mountains will go taller. The Storm River alas probably not going wider, as that stuffs up the dimensions - but the middle region might get elevated a bit more so it's a further step up on that side of the river.

The city - - well, I'm busily at work on the castle in the centre of the city board. What I had used for the Tavern in the first version (an expanded 'London Escape' pirates of the Carib tavern) will move into the city to become the '6 Fates Inn' near the wharf.

The main challenge is to keep it modularized. That's where the basic space is a 16*16 plate and the river 8*16 plates. I'm allowing myself though to journalise the board this time around - - I'm splitting the Ruins and Forest, so in the Outer region there will be one 'special' space (Graveyard, Ruins, Forest and Crags) on each side. Just makes it easier to balance it all.

My Inner region really was a 1st draft - I wasn't happy with it but I'd broken my leg in Aug 2016 and that impacted my build up to Jan 17 display. So I want to do it even more justice this next time around - not sure if I'll be going for Jan 2020 Melb BV......might be Aug 2020 for Canberra.....and then back to Melb for 2021. See how it goes. Thought about doing a giant Chess diorama variant with 64 * 16*16 squares and humans coming out from their city and non-humans out from the mountains......