I've been a Talisman fan for over a decade, buying, playing, and modifying every expansion of the original game. Thus I was drawn to Guild of Blades' The World of Heroes and Tyrants Fantasy Board Game (WHAT FBG) because it billed itself as a "Talisman Variant."
The game comes with 1 17" x 22" color map, 15 color character stand-ups, 5 plastic stands, 1 28 page rule book, 1 10-sided die, 20 blue (well, gray really, but the box and the rules claim that the cards are blue) encounter cards, 15 yellow encounter cards, 10 red encounter cards, 10 item cards, 10 spell cards, 5 profession cards, 15 quest cards, and 40 character tear sheets.
The board is clearly the most attractive component of the game, and the color character stand-ups that are taken from the board's art are good looking as well. The appearance of everything else, however, ranges from the disappointingly mediocre to the embarrassing. The various cards have no art on them. Sometimes that isn't a problem, but in the case of creatures like the Gromler, the Holeite, Nullers, and Smarties, I had no idea what the creature I was fighting looked like. The art on the character stand-ups not taken from the board is embarrassingly bad. I have to go back to the early days of the hobby to find art this bad (and ironically, Talisman has some of it).
But a game is not judged by art, but by its rules, game play, and atmosphere. In WHAT FBG, the characters move around a cleverly constructed board one space at a time. Each area is blue, yellow, red or black. The black areas are special (there are tables on which you must roll) and the other areas have various color-coded encounter decks--blue are the easiest, followed by yellow and red. The goal of the game is first to either complete three quests, given out randomly at the beginning of the game or to fight and defeat one of the ten Chaos Lords (determined randomly) and second to head back to your starting space once you complete either objective.
The characters start off with scores ranging from 0 to 50 in six attributes: Intelligence, Fighting, Strength, Dexterity, Hit Points, and Saber (money). There is little game balance involved here. Every fight involves one of the attributes. The character rolls a ten-sided die and adds it to his attribute, and another player does the same for his opponent. The highest score wins, and ties are rerolled (the rules are slightly different for player versus player combat). The consequence of victory or defeat usually involves raising or lowering the same attribute that was being challenged. The problem here is that the fights end up being unbalanced. For instance, the blue encounter cards, the easy ones, have an encounter with Smarties (Intelligence 10), who will have a 9 against the Cyclops, always beating him. There are several similar circumstances, which are slightly less difficult, in the blue cards alone. The problem is that if a character loses a fight, he typically loses points from the attribute that was challenged. I don't know if the designer intended for attributes to go below zero or go below the starting quota, but nothing in the rules prevents such an occurrence. In fact, since the advantage that the Cyclops has is that his Strength can't below 6, I would infer that one's attributes can go quite low. When I played, I ended up with a character whose Fighting went down to -56.
The characters also have certain advantages and disadvantages. These were sometimes weird, unbalanced, or illogical. For instance, the Voor character is always safe on his home world, a place where there is both a lot of good stuff and a lot of danger. Unfortunately, the Voor can't go to his home world until he has the necessary requirements to win. Furthermore, for reasons only known to the designer, the Voor always loses in the Minotaur Land Zone. The Elf always defeats certain Chaos Lords and always loses to others. What incentive does he have to build up his character?
Also, the rules themselves are incomplete. Should a monster stay on a space until it is defeated as in Talisman, or should it be discarded? Does a character die if any attribute goes below zero? If hit points go below zero? Or only when the game actually says "You die"? The rules are also sometimes difficult to understand, owing to a lack of logic and poor grammar. For example, Dowrie is uses "they" to refer to the word "character" when there a number of ways to avoid that error.
The game play of WHAT FBG is worse than the rules. Many games that are fun to play have odd rules. My friends and I quickly learned that we should avoid all but the blue spaces until we were incredibly powerful. The lowest challenge number in the yellow spaces was a 9; everything else was in double digits, hard (or impossible) even for characters with good scores. We also learned that doing something "just for fun" was incredibly stupid. Going into a black area before you have a score 50 in fighting can really hurt. So what did we do? We went back and forth on blue areas. This might sound like Talisman, in which characters should explore the Outer Region before they tackle the Middle Region, but in Talisman, the Outer Region has personality. There are a tavern, ruins, church, graveyard, city, and village, all with individualized rules, in addition to the squares that let you pick up cards. The equivalent here, the blue spaces, only let you pick up blue cards. And out of the 20 blue cards, there were only 2 non-challenge encounters. Everything else was some sort of fight--a challenge in which attributes were won or lost. The yellow and red areas were worse--all of the encounters were fights. Compare that to Talisman, which offers the possibility of meeting strangers, coming across caves, gathering followers, and so on.
But worse than the personality that the game didn't have was the personality that it did have. The designer, unwisely, puts in encounters that are clearly funny to him. For instance, one of the encounter cards is with Health Nuts and another is with Druggies. And then the flavor text is a mixture of bad jokes, bad grammar, boring comments, and lots and lots of exclamation points. The flavor was so bad that I wonder if it isn't a parody of flavor text. Some examples with all of the grammatical and stylistic errors kept intact:
Card: Flavor Text
Mad Genius: I didn't think he was so smart!
Mecha A-1: It made a bunch of noise when it moved.
Mutated T-Rex: It had two heads. And we just barley
escaped with our lives.
Leprechaun: He was just a little guy, but he run hide
and fight.
Phantom: He looked bad, I keept thinking "wow is he
ugly"!
Giant Scorpions: They were big!! Did I say they were big,
because they were!
Rats: Boy are they hungary!
Gromler: It just kept trying to urinate on us.
Sword: It is nice and shiny!
So this is how our game went: We made horrible mistakes with our first characters, stumbling into encounters much too difficult for us. With our second characters, we were much more cautious, and we had less fun (well, dying due to lack of caution the first time around wasn't all that fun either). Every couple of minutes, we discussed some inane rule or lack of rule or some particularly hideous piece of flavor text. At the end of the game, one of my friends said to me, "I hope you don't if we never play this game again." I sure don't.
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(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)