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I was in Barnes and Noble the other day and noticed that they had extended their board / strategy game section. They have a few copies of Talisman (which I have heard of before, but know nothing about) I thought looked interesting. What are the similarities to Heroquest? Would my wife like playing this game with me ? Is there a current game that i can buy that will be more like HeroQuest ?

I've not played it, but I can tell you that it's a far more traditional board game than a hack'n'slash dungeon crawl board game.

Are there get out of jail free cards? (Shameless excuse for a bump).
There's gotta be someone out there who plays talisman.

Talisman is a fantastic game, imo.

General overview?

The object of the game is to adventure the board (usually drawing adventure cards) to build your strength, break through the Portal of Power, seize the Crown of Command and use it's magic to destroy your foes.

There are a bunch of different adventurers to be, from warriors who can dual wield to necromancers who raise defeated enemies from the dead to draw on their strength. You can carry objects, recruit followers and kill monsters for trophies to increase your strength or craft (basically mental strength).

The game is not very complicated. It plays 2-6 reasonably well (turns are usually fast so people don't get bored) and overall the base game is very balanced. There are some issues with certain expansions (the warhorse in the City expansion is game breaking), but they're few in number. I highly, highly recommend the game. Fantasy Flight's version plays really well, and comes with a bunch of plastic miniatures if you want something to paint with your game.

And they're about to release a 40K version of Talisman called 'Relic'.

Definitely want some minis to paint with the game. I think I'll have to pick up a copy and force the wife to play it. If the Relic minis can be used for 40K I'll probably pick that up also.

So do you move around a board or are the encounters more role play based? Is one player a DM?

You move around the boad in a traditional boardgame style, you roll a dice, get a 4, you can move four spaces clockwise or anti-clockwise, and encounter te square you land on, normally drawing a number of cards which can be bags of gold, imps who send you somwhere, a friendly hermit or a range of monsters from goblins to dragons. You dice off and add your strength to your roll to see if you beat the montsers, some use Craft however in which case you'll dice off and add your craft to see who wins. There is no need for a DM. Me and my lass (who isn't a gamer, but is secretly a geek) picked this up and she was instantly hooked!

 TheLionOfTheForest wrote:
Definitely want some minis to paint with the game. I think I'll have to pick up a copy and force the wife to play it. If the Relic minis can be used for 40K I'll probably pick that up also.

Relic doesn't use minis, as FFG's agreement with GW doesn't allow them to produce competing miniatures, so it has detailed plastic busts for each of the character types. No reason you couldn't paint them though.

I've never played a game of Talisman that wasn't 4 hours long.

Even after all of that, you don't always have a winner. The expansions can make the final battle very difficult. Still, if it wasn't a fun game, we wouldn't pull it out.

I played the demo of Relic at GenCon last year and thought it streamlined things nicely. The plastic busts they used had lots of detail. I'm hopeful that version can be played and won in under 3 hours, though.

Did you want more information on how to actually play? There is no DM. You play it like Monopoly or Life, going round and round on the board, encountering monsters and finding treasure, all the while leveling up your character and getting ready for the final fight at the end of the game.

A fight you might lose and then the next player step up and win on the following turn. So don't feth up!

 kronk wrote:
I've never played a game of Talisman that wasn't 4 hours long.

Even after all of that, you don't always have a winner. The expansions can make the final battle very difficult. Still, if it wasn't a fun game, we wouldn't pull it out.

I played the demo of Relic at GenCon last year and thought it streamlined things nicely. The plastic busts they used had lots of detail. I'm hopeful that version can be played and won in under 3 hours, though.

Did you want more information on how to actually play? There is no DM. You play it like Monopoly or Life, going round and round on the board, encountering monsters and finding treasure, all the while leveling up your character and getting ready for the final fight at the end of the game.

A fight you might lose and then the next player step up and win on the following turn. So don't feth up!

That sounds a little dissapointing. I'm not really interested in busts as replacement of characters. I guess I will just dust off my HerosQuest box and replace the minis I am missing.

A picture of some of the busts.

Depending on the sizes of the busts I could see them making good scenic pieces for an imperial city.

It's a boardgame rather than a miniatures game so there's really nothing wrong with busts. As other have mentioned, Talisman has much more in common with Monopoly than D&D or 40k.

It's an okay game but it's fairly long-winded and even when I have won I didn't feel like I achieved much. It'd kind of a screw your buddy type game. These days, a lot of fantasy-themed board games offer cooperative play aspects that, IMO, make them much more worthwhile. Talisman is a little behind the times in this respect.

It's a fun game, but games can take ages, and at the end of it, you'll want to slit your wrists. it can be fun, but you'll really need to be a board gamer to "get it."

--Chris
www.chrisvalera.com

Basically, it's a great game to sit with your buddies and throw back some beers.

Also, the busts: I think they're gorgeous, and I'm willing to bet FFG will be selling copies of Relic to painters that have no interest in playing the game.

Talisman is a bit too simple for most experienced gamers. It's really...

1. Pick a character with varying special abilities/starting equipment.
2. Roll a d6 each turn, moving that many spaces this way or that way,
3. Encounter the special location on the space or draw card to find monsters or treasure or special stuff. Or if you land on a space with another player's character you can attack them instead to do a bit of damage or steal one of their items.
4. Accumulate power and treasures to get tough enough to make a run through the tough adversaries and obstacles at the center of the board and get the Crown so you can win.
5. When someone else is making a run, race him there and/or attack him to stop him.

The play is pretty simplistic and definitely old-fashioned by modern game standards. OTOH, that can be a virtue if you're playing with a non-gamer or group of non-gamers, and/or if the group is drinking and shooting the bull and doesn't want to concentrate on a complex game or one with involved strategy. I've known several non- or semi-gamer females who enjoyed Talisman much more than more hardcore or complex fare. It has all the trappings of D&D-style fantasy (character classes, monsters, treasures, undead, dungeons, magic spells, etc.), and so the theme is appealing for a lot of us, and it can make a simple intro to D&D-style stuff for new gamers.

The game does have a tendency to run long, especially because there's no mechanism FORCING you to hurry up and make a run for the center, except for the other players. When I was a kid my brother and I would happily wander around the board for hours, jacking up our characters with stats and piles of treasures which would enable us to pretty easily walk through the middle obstacles, and once one of us made a run it was pretty much down to whether the other guy could catch him and beat him in combat before he got too many turns using the Crown.

I understand that more recent editions may have sped the game up a little, though for me a lot of the game's appeal is the classic 1980s GW art on the cards and board; Ian Miller and other greats really did some very nice work.

And if you want to read the rules for Relic, here they are.

Thanks for that!

I've had some pretty extensive experience with the latest edition of talisman, and I must say it's a very solid pick up and play game. The rules aren't terribly complicated, and even younger players don't have too much trouble grasping it.

However, I will say be wary of the expansions. Balance wise FFG really dropped the ball many times. For example, when someone gets "toaded", they become a toad for 3 turns, moving very slowly and having piss poor stats. On top of this, they drop all their gear in the space they got toaded on. When someone drops good loot, it's a race for the other players to go and get it. First they have to make it to the general area, then they have to roll the exact number of spaces required to land on the area. It's quite a clusterfeth of people fighting and snatching to get at that pile of goodies.

Now enter the leprechaun, a class introduced in...city expansion I believe. Every time you move, on a roll of 6, you can go to any space in the region you're in. The ability was originally reserved to a spell in the magic deck, and lucky rolling in certain areas. With the fate mechanic, you can reroll as long as you have enough token to get that 6. Considering much of talisman is based on being in the right spot at the right time, this is a pretty sizeable advantage over something like the druid, who gets limited spellcasting and the ability to switch alignments at will.

Also, why does FFG hate it's religious characters? Talisman, arkham horror, eh...there was a third I think, each games priest/nun character is easily the worst character in the game.

Don't get me wrong though, some of the expansions add great ideas to the game, particularly the death and werewolf stuff. On a roll of 1, which generally sucks because you only move a single space, which almost always means the place you're trying to get to will take that much longer, means you get to move the grim reaper or werewolf. You roll for them, and try to get them to land on another player so that they might get killed or suffer some form of hurt.

Had a friend play once in a group of 4 and had the werewolf land on him. On a roll of 2 you take a wound and reroll. My friend surely wasn't expecting to roll 2 five times in a row, forcing him to take a reroll and still getting killed off on his second or third turn. Twas great.