Talisman - PC

[airboy]

Bought/Played Talisman on the PC.  Talisman was a reasonably popular tabletop game in the late 80s to the 90s.

For good & bad, the PC version played flawlessly.  Good - it is a reasonably interesting theme.  If you play against AI opponents (they play well), it plays much faster than against humans.  Bad - it is a slow game and highly luck driven.  No real strategy.

I'm left feeling that this was an OK purchase that I might play occasionally, but not something to be highly recommended unless you like Talisman itself more than I.

[airboy]

I've completed two games.  Here is my take from my game blog:

My wife and I played the Talisman board game way back in the mid to late 1980s when we were engaged or newlyweds. Talisman is a fantasy based game where you have to kill off all of the other players to achieve final victory. You take the role of one of core fantasy game character types: warrior, priest, monk, wizard, thief, troll and so on.

The board has three concentric circles. It is hard to cross into the middle circle from the outer circle, and even harder to pass into the innermost circle from the middle circle. If you reach the dead center space on the innermost circle, you get the crown of command with a 50% chance of taking a life from all opponents every turn.

The graphics were pretty, it was one of the few character building fantasy games on the market back in the day. We played it a couple of times with just us and a couple of times with others. The game suffered from some serious flaws. It was pretty much a 100% luck game. It takes a long time to build a characters power levels up to where they can survive in the inner circles. And the game took a very long time to complete. The more players, the more time it took.

This week I bought the Steam version of Talisman having fond (and hazy) thoughts about when I played it 35 or so years ago. The PC version plays pretty much exactly the same as the original board game with significant advantages and one disadvantage.

The advantages are: you don't need to round up opponents and play is faster with AI opponents with the speed ramped up to the max. The disadvantage of the PC version is occasionally an AI opponent will take the opportunity to teleport into more dangerous circles prematurely. They get stuck there for a long time until they finally die off and respawn.

But the core disadvantages of the original Talisman game remain: it is a long, luck based game with little to no strategy beyond what luck gives you. The PC game also allows you to play people across the planet via the internet – but that would make the game even slower than a face-to-face game.

I go to several tabletop game conventions every year – the 2020 plague year being an exception. Despite Talisman's popularity back in the day and all of the expansions, you don't see people playing Talisman when they have the opportunity to play something better.

In sum, the PC port of Talisman is well executed but the game itself is not that good.