Talisman

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	Fun and easy to play .
Disadvantages:	It can take a while to finish .  It takes ages to pack up .  Hundreds of cards .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Wow. I would never have found - let alone thought to look for - Talisman as a product to review here on Ciao. Luckily, the name Talisman was included in the list of matches for products I had just run a search on and so I can set about trying to describe the game which is too large for all bar the largest of dining room tables.

Actually, I’m not going to review Talisman. I can do better than that. I can offer up for public debate the highs and lows of:
Talisman (second ed)
Talisman Adventure
Talisman Expansion
Talisman City
Talisman Dungeon
Talisman Timescape
Talisman Dragon

You see; I have the entire and highly collectable set of the infamous second edition. This review, therefore, is not one on the first edition nor is it one on the latest and third edition.

> Talisman

The main boxed set comes with a four piece playing board which jigsaws together to form the land of Talisman. You are also given a large pack of character cards, equipment cards, adventure cards and counters.

You know when you play Monopoly everyone always wants to be the top hat or the dog? They might look better than the other playing pieces but they don’t really affect your game at all. This is not the case in Talisman. In the Talisman quest who you are effects the way you must play the game. This is where the character cards influence the game and this is why the most fair way to play the game is to randomly deal out a character card to all the players.

Let’s say, at the start of the game, I’ve just dealt you the Druid card, this means you’re playing a Druid in the game. There is a cardboard picture of a druid that you can slot into a plastic base and move around the various lands of Talisman. This is you. As a druid you’re not very strong but you’re cunning and have magic.

Let’s say, though, that I deal you the barbarian character card instead. You’ll find that the barbarian starts on a different location on the board than the druid. You’ll find that you’re twice as strong as the druid but that you’re not so smart and don’t have any spells.

Talisman is not really a strategy game. You fate is largely controlled by the dice and by the random order in which the adventure cards are played out. That said, a great deal of common sense is required to win. To explore the world you simply roll the dice on your turn and move your cardboard character that many spaces, in either direction, around the board. The space on which you land will have some instructions but in most cases you’ll be required to randomly draw an adventure card from the deck.

Most of these adventure cards will be monsters that will want to kill you. Some adventure cards, though, are friendly encounters with people who might want to help you. Other adventure cards might be events which effect the entire game such as earthquakes and cosmic alignments of planets or you might be lucky enough to find some magical item lying around which will, no doubt, greatly help you win the game.

I’ll go back to the monster encounters for just a minute. Most monsters are thugs that’ll charge into combat with you. Hmm, I’ve just used more descriptive flare than the game does. The monster card will probably say something like “Orc. Strength 3”. This means that you’ve got to use your strength to defeat the orc. That’s easy. Roll one dice and add your strength. One of your friends will roll one dice and add the orc’s strength to it. If your total is higher than you’ve just killed the orc. If the orc’s total is higher then its beaten you and you have to loose a life, don’t worry, though, you have four lives.

This is where being the barbarian helps. He has strength 4. The odds on the barbarian winning the fight are higher. The poor Druid though only has strength 2.

Some fights, though, are with spirits and ghosts. In these cases your strength does not help you, instead you have to use the “craft” of your character. To follow our comparison between the druid and the barbarian I should point out that, this time, the druid has Craft 3 and the barbarian only Craft 2. The druid has other abilities that can affect the game but if I spent this review detailing all the abilities of all the characters then I’d be here for dozens of pages.

In essence, you need to wander around the deadly world to collect items and build up your strength. The most important items are, duh, the talismans which allow you to walk through the Realm of Fire near the end of the game. If you don’t have a Talisman you can always go beat up a rival character and take his off him - there is nothing restricting you to only fighting the random monsters that you encounter.

In the basic set of Talisman the first player to make to the very heart of the land will be the winner.

Talisman is a surprisingly simple game and despite its reliance on the luck of the dice it is also enjoyable. It is an easy and friendly way to spend a few hours with two to a dozen friends.

> You can start to get silly. You can build onto the world of Talisman.

The Adventure and Expansion sets offer up similar things. These boxes include more cards to add to your collection of cards, spells, items and encounters. Each additional purchase increases the power level of your game. That is to say, the adventure cards include scarier monsters and more frightening events, the spells are more deadly and devastating, the new characters have an even wider range of special abilities.

You also will pick up the alternative ending cards from one of these packs. Rather than simply winning the game once you reach the centre you must pick from a special set of cards. In the heart of the land you might discover that the horde of gold there isn’t just up for the taking but that the mighty Dragon King guards it! You need to win one last fight before you can claim success. Or, you might discover Pandora’s Box there instead and trust to fate that you return triumphant.

I would estimate that the addition of either one of these two sets will add, on average, half an hour to the length of your game.

> Talisman City

On the original Talisman game board one of the corner squares is that of the city. In the city you can rush off to visit a doctor or pop into a shop and purchase the sturdiest suit of armour that you can afford. If you have Talisman City then this one square in the board becomes the portal to a brand new playing area! If your character lands on the City Square then you have the choice of leaving the normal playing area and moving your character to the Talisman City board. The city is different from the countryside - rather than picking Adventure Cards, for example, you pick City Cards instead. In the city you’re not going to be attacked by orcs, but you might get questioned by an entire patrol of the City Watch and if that happens you had better hope none of the other players hasn’t bribed the city officials into putting a warrant out for your arrest.

In many ways Talisman City is the sanest of the possible expansion sets. The city offers a bit of extra tactics to the game. If you’re not doing very well in the rough countryside and you’re not playing a character that is doomed to failure in the city (you could be an orc or a minotaur yourself, you know) then you can retreat into the safer (just) city and go shopping instead. I mean it, you can visit shops and purchase spells, items or even take trust to your luck and try and steal an interesting looking potion out from the alchemist.

Talisman City, though, also brings with it the biggest potential spoilers of the game. Here it is possible to upgrade your character to something else. For example, you might encounter a wandering beggar on the streets of the city (as drawn from random from the City Cards) and if you do then you have the option to give the poor fellow one of your precious and hard earned gold tokens. If you do give him a gold piece and roll a 6 on the dice then this beggar is in fact the King of the Land! As a reward he’ll make you his Champion. This brings extra strength, resources and legal immunity to your character. If you were playing our Druid you could now be as strong as the Barbarian who’s been picking on you and still have all your magic powers. Revenge!

I would say that Talisman City can add half an hour to the length of your game.

> Talisman Dungeon

This is a dangerous place. Talisman Dungeon, like Talisman City, offers you another extra playing board in which you can take your character off to. Just like with City this expansion set for the game brings you more characters, items and its own brand of encounter – Dungeon Cards. Also, Talisman Dungeon has a number of new adventure cards to mix into your deck. These new cards are for “Dungeon Doors” and it is these that provide access to the dark place.

Unfortunately, my copy of Talisman Dungeon failed to match the green colour on the back of average “Adventure Cards” with the green on the back of the Dungeon Doors. As a result, you know in advance when the next card to be drawn will be a Dungeon Door.

The actual Dungeon isn’t very inspiring itself. It is a spiralling crawl through a set of nasty encounters, a sure-fire way to kill off weak characters. The lure of the Dungeon are the few but powerful items which might be found there and the chance that if you reach the bottom you’ll be teleported straight to the Heart of the Land and have a chance of winning the game. If you don’t have a Talisman then you might be able to race through the Dungeon and pip a rival player to the post and steal victory from underneath them.

I would say that Talisman Dungeon can add half an hour to the length of your game.

> Talisman Timescape

I’ve told you that the Dungeon was a dangerous place and that’s true, however, the encounters there are sometimes a walk in the park compared to what you might encounter if you find yourself in the Timescape.

Timescape provides yet another new board for the game, new characters (this time, futuristic heroes and villains such as Chainsaw Warriors) as well as the usual plethora of extra cards, items, special future items and, of course, Timescape Encounter cards.

I feel that Timescape works better than Dungeon does. The method of moving your character around the Timescape board is different. You still roll a dice but rather than moving that number of spaces you move your cardboard cut out along the correct line. For example, if you roll a 1 or a 2 then you move along the red line. The game designers where suitably evil and it is possible that you find yourself moving from near the end of the Timescape board all the way back to the beginning again.

Some people think that the future elements of this expansion unbalance the game. After all, no matter how strong you as a barbarian are you still don’t have much chance against some adventurer from the future who can set his Attack Battle Robot onto you. I disagree. The new character are not all that much more powerful than the average basic character and there’s certainly no guarantee that they’ll ever escape the Timescape (where they all must start) in the first place. It’s also very possible that you’ll be able to pick up a chainsaw and give it to your barbarian. There now, even less reason to worry about pesky orcs.

I would say that Talisman Timescape can add half an hour to the length of your game.

> Talisman Dragon

This was the last expansion pack for the second edition of Talisman, production stopped after this. The cult following of the game grew and grew and Games Workshop responded (as they always do) by releasing a brand new (dumbed down) third version.

Talisman Dragon does not offer any new playing boards. Instead, Dragon offers you a few more characters to play and a mix of extra cards to add to your Adventure deck.

The idea behind Talisman Dragon is to try and add some story to the board game. Imagine the deadly world of Talisman where an insane Dragon Cult is going around en mass with its attempts to appease the dragons by sacrificing people off to them. Unsurprisingly, Talisman Dragon brings you a new collection of possible Dragon encounters. Running into a dragon was bad enough (Strength 7) before but with this addition to the game you can encounter beefed up dragons which are even tougher.

I would say that Talisman Dragon could reduce the length of time it takes you to play. You'll either die quickly or win.

> Final Comments

I have a tower of Talisman boxes, as I said at the start of the review, I have the compete set. In fact, I have so many additions to the game that setting up all the different playing boards and dealing out all the correct cards and counters can take ages in its own right.

I’ve not played the game in, urm, years. However, if I ended up with a number of friends at my house and the TV wasn’t distracting them then I certainly would consider brushing the cobwebs off my collection again.

Since the luck of the dice does affect the game it means that experience players have no guarantee of doing any better than total newbies. On the other hand, it can be rather frustrating to suffer a run of bad luck.

If you are a gamer then you could do much worse than playing Talisman.