I played a lot of the original Talisman board game by Games Workshop in college. The board game is now in its fourth edition. There have been spin-off versions of the board game, including a Batman and a Kingdom Hearts version. There are digital versions available on, at least, Steam and iOS. This review is about none of those. It is a review of the digital Talisman: Origins.
Talisman is a competitive dungeon crawl. The board consists of three nested, rectangular regions. Each player moves their character through these regions. In true dungeon crawl fashion, the characters fight monsters, encounter NPCs, and collect items until they are powerful enough to take on the boss. In the base game of Talisman, the boss is not someone a character fights. It is the Crown of Command, a legendary item that the character uses to reign destruction down on the other characters. To get the Crown of Command, a character does have to fight their way through the inner region, which requires either power or luck.
Talisman has many expansions. Some add new boards that can be accessed from the main board. Others add new characters, new monsters, new events, new NPCs, new items, or new rules. Some also replace the Crown of Command either with other items or a big bad that has to be fought to win.
Talisman is not a great board game. Back when it came out, over forty years ago, there were not a lot of great board games. I have a lot of nostalgia for it, so I would argue that it is at least a decent board game. It has inarguably been successful.
Talisman has many things going of it, including:
Variable player powers - This is an option highly valued in modern board games. The base game comes with a large number of player characters, with a great variety of strengths, weaknesses, and play styles. With the expansions, there are several dozen.
A large number of encounter types - A character encounters a monster, etc., by drawing a card from a deck. The game has several hundred of these cards, very few of which are duplicates. This is great from a replayability standpoint.
It also has some major drawbacks, including:
Roll and move - A character moves around the board by rolling a die and moving that number of spaces to the left or right. There are a few, not many, ways to affect the number of spaces moved. Sometimes, a character can choose to move between regions on the board. If expansions with new boards are being used, the character might have a third direction in which to move. But one of the signature Talisman experiences is to be trying to get to a specific space and wasting several turns moving past it.
Lack of clear goals - For most of the game, characters wander around the board and experience random encounters. Only near the end of the game, when the characters are racing to get to the Crown of Command, does it seem like there is a focus to the game.
Long second act - A Talisman game has three acts. In the first act, the characters are all wimpy and just trying to live long enough to gain some power. In the second act, at least some of the characters are powerful enough that nothing in the outer or middle region is a serious threat to them. They are not, however, powerful enough to risk the inner region and move into the final act. The middle act often seems to take forever. Some of the expansions mitigate this problem by providing more powerful monsters to fight. I find that the Dragons and Highland expansions, in particular, help with this. In the early game, these expansions make the game more deadly. In the mid-game, they allow characters to get experience faster.
Downtime - A player does not have anything to do while the other players take their turns. Thus my group’s tongue-in-cheek mantra, “Play fast or we hit you.” I also find that playing Talisman solo on the iPad speeds things up a lot. Going against an AI player rather than human ones reduces downtime quite a bit.
What does this have to do with Talisman: Origins? Talisman: Origins is a digital version of Talisman designed to be played solo. To try to make the game more interesting, it adds a narrative. In the story I played, the Dwarf character was trying to build some sort of mech. To do this, he had to find some specific cards and then experience a specific event. Otherwise, the gameplay was pure Talisman.
I do not think that the game really pulled it off. At its heart, Talisman is a race game. Even in the digital version, there are AI opponents that can beat you to the Crown of Command. In Origins, there was no sense of having a time limit. The player did not have to worry about getting back to a space with goodies on it before another player. Spaces that could make the character lose a turn were no longer very threatening. There was no sense of tension. The player could still lose through bad luck, always possible in Talisman, or bad play. Mostly, the gameplay is wandering around until the right cards come up.
Which is another problem. I am pretty sure that Origins stacks the deck. The Dwarf cannot find the quest objects too early in the game. The event cannot occur until after all of the objects have been found. None of these can be guaranteed with a totally random deck. I felt the game was being manipulated. It definitely had a flavor of visual novel about it.
I do not think I will go back to Origins, unless I am really bored and want to see how later chapters in the Dwarf’s story work. For my occasional Talisman fix, I will keep to the digital version of the board game. I can play as my favorite characters and choose the most interesting or helpful expansions. Talisman is not a game that many people will love. Origins is not going to help that.
Den of the Red Wolf 