Review of Talisman

Talisman (The Magical Quest Game) is a new printing of a classic adventure game by Black Industries.

Players: 2-6
Playing Time: 2-5 hours

This is an early review; the game is available at GenCon this weekend and can be preordered starting on the 20th. It won't be widely available until October 1, 2007.

The Components

When you open the new box of Talisman it's immediately obvious that some real effort, attention, and cost went into the new production. The components are all great quality.

Box & Tray: The box is a standard square box of the sort that's common in games nowadays. However of real note is the tray inside. It's plastic, but covered in felt, the only tray I've ever seen so luxurious. It's got individual slots for six different decks of cards, each the perfect height, and a large hole for everything else.

Board: A large six-panel board. It portrays the three rings of the Talisman world with attractive, if muted, art by Ralph Horsley. There's plenty of room to place all the cards that will accumulate during play. On the downside the descriptions of each space are entirely textual. There was no attempt to use icons to easily depict what each space does, and thus they're entirely unreadable from across the table. This problem has a lot to do with the game's origins: this sort of text display was more common in the 1970s and 1980s, but games have come a long way since, and Talisman unfortunately wasn't upgraded to these newer standards.

Player Markers: There are markers for 14 different player types, from priests to ghouls, plus four toads. Each includes a stand-up figure printed on glossy cardboard, plus a plastic stand. The art on these pieces (and the cards that we'll get to presently) is much brighter than that on the board and really sets the standard for high-quality fantasy art in this edition.

Dice: Six six-sided dice, way more than enough, which is great. They're all plastic, printed with mottled gold, with a Talisman symbol on the "1" side, and they generally look quite nice.

Other Plastic Bits: This includes gold coins and gem counters. The gold coins are made from molded plastic and are nicely evocative.

The "gem" counters are plastic bits that record a player's strength (red squares), craft (blue circles), and life (green triangles). Each has a number printed on it, from 1 to 4, with the idea being that you have a pile of counters of the appropriate values to sum up your chracter's characteristics. Unfortunately these numbers are really low contrast. They're almost unreadable to the player himself and totally unreadable from across the table. If you're playing with two or three players, just use each counter as a "1" and it'll be really easy to count them up. With more players you'll unfortunately have to squint and use the numbers as presented.

Cards: There are a pile of cards in this game including double-sized character cards and various (regular sized) purchase, adventure, spell, and talisman cards--which represent various things which the players can acquire during the game. They're all printed on medium-heavy glossy cardstock, with brightly colored backs that make it easy to distinguish the different decks of cards. Like the figures they have great art on them, but unfortunately like the board there's been no effort made to iconify what does what.

Rulebook: A full color rulebook that's carefully and boldly depicts everything you need to play the game. It's very easy to reference during play and an encounter sequence flowchart on the back page helped us out when we had questions during a game.

Overall Talisman has great quality components that are generally beautiful. Unfortunately the game falls down in usability to an extent that might have been the norm in 1983 but is very much behind the times today. Some careful work by someone more familiar with today's boardgaming market could have made the game much easier to play, even just by simple things like putting strength and craft values in red squares and blue circles on items.

Nonetheless I've given Talisman a "4" out of "5" for Style: other than its one failing, the components are terrific.

The Gameplay

The object of Talisman is to get to the center of the board, and then to use the Crown of Command to kill all the other characters.

Setup: Each player chooses a character. He then takes the listed value of strength and craft, 1 gold, and 4 life. Each character also has various powers listed on his character card. For example the Elf is safe in the forest, may evade enemies in the woods, and may move from one woods to another. Some special powers state that the characters start with spells, which the player draws. These allow for various one-time effects. Finally the character card also says where the player starts the game, in one of the spaces in the outer ring.

Taking a Turn: The sequence of a turn is very simple, generally: the player rolls one die. He then moves that many spaces around his current ring, either clockwise or counterwise, his choice, which means he gets to choose between two spaces.

(The exception is when you're in the inner ring, where you just move one space as noted below.)

Landing in a space he either encounters the space or encounters other characters there.

Encountering a Space: This is the most common result when you land on a space. Most spaces say to draw one card, or sometimes two or three. The player draws that many cards then encounters them. In the case of multiple cards, they're encountered in a listed order, which typically means that a player has to face monsters before taking treasure. It should also be noted that cards can be left in spaces because they weren't defeated or because they say to stay there. In this case the next player to land on this space draws that many less cards, and instead encounters the existing ones.

The cards can be a variety of types:

Events. These are typically bad things that affect all the players or all the players in a ring.

Monsters. These are enemies that must be defeated. The player rolls a die and adds his strength; another player rolls a die and adds the monster's strength. If the player loses, he loses a point of life and the monster sticks around to be fought by someone who later lands on the space. If the player wins he kills the monster and takes the card as a trophy: it can later be turned in for additional strength at a 7:1 ratio (e.g., 7 monster worth of strength to gain the player 1 strength).

Spirits. These are just like monsters except they must be fought with craft; likewise when the cards are saved, they're turned in for craft.

Strangers. These are people who usually do good things, such as a mage who gives away a spell.

Objects. This is loot! Sometimes it's gold, but sometimes it's items such as weapons or armor which can make your character better (often by adding strength or craft or by protecting from some hits).

Places. These are typically permanent locations which have some effect when a player lands on them.

Special Spaces. Some spaces don't say to draw cards, but instead have a chart that you roll on. For most spaces if you roll a 1-3 it's a bad effect and if you roll a 4-6 it's a good effect. Some spaces have even more varied effects. The inner ring is all special spaces which must be conquered one-by-one to win the game.

Encountering a Player: Instead of encountering a space you can encounter a player upon that space. In this case you fight them, each rolling a die and adding strength. The winner can cost his opponent a life, steal an object, or steal a coin.

Moving Between Rings: As noted, the board is divided into three rings. The outer ring contains regular encounters. The middle ring contains some encounters that are tougher and also has some locations where you can win a Talisman. The inner ring is special in that you can only move one space a turn, and each space is a difficult encounter that you must overcome.

Moving between the rings is somewhat difficult to. To get into the middle ring you must face a tough encounter or else build a raft with an axe in the woods. To get into the inner ring you must face a hard die roll. Finally, you can't get to the space leading to the Crown of Command unless you have a Talisman. You can get this from a few spaces in the middle ring, or else as a lucky draw on a draw-card space.

In order to face the encounters of the inner ring, players must increase their strength and/or craft through stat increases (mostly from trading in enemy trophies), which is where much of the game is spent.

Winning the Game: When you get to the Crown of Command, you then try each turn to cast the Command spell, which if successful does everyone else 1 point of damage. The point is to keep doing this until everyone else expires, but in the meantime other people can get to the Crown and try and take it away from you. When someone finally succeeds at killing everyone else, they win the game.

Speed Ups: Talisman can be a very long game, even before you get to the endless iteration of people getting to the center and trying to kill everyone else. There are a few speed ups listed in this edition of Talisman as options. One suggests reducing the strength/craft trade-in ratio to 6:1 or 5:1. Another suggests just naming the first person to get to the Crown the winner. Though these definitively will speed up any individual game, games can still stretch on for an extended period of time and the 90 minutes quoted on the box seems unlikely. The one time I tried with all the speed-ups we ran two and a half hours with three players, and probably would have gone another hour if we hadn't de facto crowned a winner.

Relationships to Other Games

Talisman is a classic "adventure" game that was released by Games Workshop in its first edition in 1983, and shortly thereafter was reprinted in its best-known second edition. As with most adventure games, Talisman mirrors the roleplaying experience, but with a board game sensbility. Players have characters which they improve through play to achieve some goal.

Although Talisman wasn't the first adventure game, that being TSR's Dungeon! (1975), Talisman was the game that led the 1980s explosion of the medium. Especially after they produced HeroQuest (1989), Games Workshop was the heart of adventure gaming--until miniatures production totally took them over.

The adventure gaming market died out after that, but it has since been revived, with Fantasy Flight Games taking the role that Games Workshop once held. Their Runebound is analogous to Talisman as a competitive adventure game while their Descent is analogous to HeroQuest as a gamemaster-driven game.

This is the market that the new Talisman has been reintroduced to. The new game is a slight revision of the second edition of the game--not the third edition which Games Workshop put out in the 1990s. Beyond some slight clean up, the game is largely unchanged. This ends up being both boon and bane. On the one hand, as a revision of the 1980s Talisman this new game has a very standard fantasy setting, which is endearing and differentiates it from some of the grittier modern games. On the other hand, Talisman very much shows its roots as a 1980s game design that hasn't learned any of the lessons of the last twenty years of design work.

The Game Design

Talisman is a game that mainly makes its mark through the aforementioned theming. There's a lot of color in the game, from its adventure cards to its board locations, and that's the main thing that makes it appealing to play.

Unfortunately--as was pretty commonly the case in the 1980s designs--while the theming ruled, the mechanics were solely rudimentary. Most of the game centers on random chance, from where you can move, to what happens when you get there, to whether you're successful in conflicts or not. There is some opportunity for strategic play, but it primarily centers on the question of when to move inward and when not to.

The other notable issue with the game is ultimately its playing time. Despite the attempts to provide shortened gameplay, the game can take many hours even with all the minimzation in place. This was much more expected for an Anglo-American game in the 1980s, but in today's market of faster games, it really makes Talisman stand out (to its deficit). The endgame can really contribute to this in a negative way, with things stretching on for hours after players start trying to use the Crown of Command.

Finally the game also has one Anglo-American element that drives me crazy: often the first person to almost win isn't the winner, but instead it's the third or fourth person who achieves an exhausting win by attrition when everyone else has expended their resources to stop the previous would-be winners.

When I first heard that Talisman was being reissued, I'd hoped that Black Industries would do with it what Fantasy Flight Games did with Arkham Horror--which is largely revise the game to take advantage of both the graphical and mechanical advances of the last twenty years of game design. That they didn't is disappointing: if they had this could have been another classic for the next decade.

With all that said, I can recommend Talisman for two groups:

First, it's not a bad beginner's game. If you have kids in particular, this game could be a great start because the core play is a lot simpler than Runebound, Dungeoneer, and other such releases, primarily due to the lack of choices.

Second, it will definitely appeal to those who enjoyed Talisman in the past. It's a much nicer edition than what was put out in the 1980s, and old fans should be eager to grab a copy.

I've given Talisman an overall "3" out of "5" for Substance: average. That is based somewhat on nolstalgia and somewhat on Talisman's position as a leader of the medium of adventure games. For a modern release I might be a bit harsher, but as is usually the case I try and rate a game as it will appeal to its intended audience, and for Talisman I'm pretty sure that's the groups I mentioned.

Conclusion

The new edition of Talisman will appeal to fans of the old game, because its largely unchanged other than upgraded components. However that unchanging state also is the game's ultimate fault, because it plays entirely like a mid-1980s Anglo-American game, full of randomness and very long play. The adventure game market has come a long ways since Talisman's original release, and unfortunately the game wasn't updated to reflect that.