In 1983, Bob Harris reworked a school-based board game he already had to form one with dwarves, elves, warriors and wizards, and Talisman was born—another fine example of an old game that’s lasted a long time.
In this 2–6 player roll and move game, where you at least get to choose the direction of movement, you roam around a fantasy world battling a range of enemies as well as other players, acquiring followers, weapons and treasure (the most important of those being the Talisman), making your way to the centre of the board where you’ll… Well, let’s wait for a moment before I describe that. It employs a lot of Dragons & Dungeons concepts, such as alignment (good, evil or neutral), health points and other statistics, battles resolved with dice, and of course, the fantasy environment, but it provides a selection of pre-built characters (no hours of tedious character creation before you start playing) and sort of manages the role of the dungeon master within the drawing of random cards on the board’s spaces.
But I would say that probably the most important feature of Talisman was (and still is, though it’s been watered down in the latest edition of the game) the concept of being ‘toaded’—this was what players lived for. Rather, players lived for seeing other players being hit by a spell or suffering an unfortunate roll of the die, resulting in them transforming into weak little Toads for the next three turns. Being toaded also meant you lost everything you were carrying, resulting in everyone else in the vicinity rushing in your direction to grab all that lovely loot.
The first version, published by Games Workshop existed for a couple of years before GW realised they had a winner on their hands, and they released the second edition in 1985, the main difference being that cards were now in colour; virtually nothing else changed.
How to Play
To begin you select a character from the fourteen available (expansions added to this number), taking its card, which details base stats and any particular abilities, and cardboard standee, which you place on the designated starting square. (The character standees are definitely of their time, and distinctly unimpressive nowadays; Citadel Miniatures produced a range of metal miniature replacements—yes, metal; this was before halfway decent plastic minis existed, and 3d-printers were little more than figments of imagination.) You take as many Strength, Craft, Gold and Life counters as indicated, and that’s it for player setup.
Shuffle the Adventure and Spell cards, keep the Purchase cards nearby, and hand the die to the first player.
A player’s turn is simplicity: roll the die, move that number of spaces, and do what it says on the space. Most tell you to draw an Adventure card (more on those in a moment), though if there are cards already on the space, you encounter them instead. A few spaces have other options, such as to sell items, heal lives, or pray. If another player is on the space you land in, you can choose to encounter the player instead of the space and any cards on it—time for a fight…
Your battle score is a die roll added to your current Strength points plus additional if you have a weapon or appropriate follower, and your opponent scores similarly—higher score wins. If you’re the winner, you can either remove a Life from your opponent (though if they have armour, they can attempt to prevent that with—you’ve guessed it—a die roll) or steal an item or gold from them. Battles with Adventure card enemies is similar, though there’s no notion of taking items from them.
If you end up with zero lives, your character expires, dropping everything it was carrying in its space. You can choose to restart with a new character, but that often doesn’t seem worth the effort given how far ahead everyone else is: a common problem with this type of game.
It’s probably time to mention Spells, a staple of any fantasy world. You pick them up from various cards and certain spaces on the board (if your die roll is auspicious), but you can only hold up to three, depending on your Craft level. While some can be useful, such as adding to Strength in battle, healing Lives or evading enemies, they don’t actually feature much in the game for most characters. (They’re of more interest in later editions, but even then, often still not a huge deal.)
Adventure cards fall into several categories:
- Enemies—animals, monsters, spirits, dragons, and so on. They will fight you on the basis of Strength or Craft depending on their type. You take the enemy card if you defeat it (which conjures up the image of your character dragging a bunch of corpses along behind them), and at the end of your turn you can turn in multiples of seven points worth of enemy Strength for an extra Strength point for your own character. In later editions of the game, you could do the same for Craft enemies and Craft points, but that’s not in the second edition’s rules—this is a rule I typically backfit anyway.
- Strangers and Places—healers, sorcerers, fountain of wisdom and the witch, to name but a few. The witch is one of the worst: you roll a die (surprise, surprise) and some values are beneficial, but the number one most certainly isn’t: that’s toading time! Any players wanting to steal your stuff will also have to encounter the witch, so they’ll run the risk of joining you in amphibianhood if they visit this space.
- Items—weapons, armour, gold pieces, and a host of other goodies, but be aware: you can carry only a maximum of four objects.
- Followers—these typically help you in some way, such as a mule (which lets you carry an additional four objects); others add to your strength or craft. A prince and princess will let you be healed for free in the castle space, or you can trade them in for money, which is saying something oddly interesting about the value of royalty. You can also sacrifice Followers to save your life towards the end of the game—loyalty to your travelling companions, who needs it?
- Events—usually bad news, such as pestilence taking a life from everyone, or having your stuff stolen, but sometimes the gods smile on you, giving you an extra turn (or, rather, making everyone else miss a turn).
End Game
The board comprises three separate regions, the outer region in which you typically start, the middle one, where the going’s just a bit tougher, and the inner one, which is a trial for the strongest adventurers only.
The inner region has a handful potentially lethal spaces, but you only have to traverse half of them: one direction from the Plain of Peril favours players with high Strength, the other high Craft, and each step along the way hits you with tough challenges, such as roll three dice and score under your Strength value. The penultimate space, the Valley of Fire, can only be entered if you’re carrying a Talisman, so woe betide you if you somehow lose it on your journey (perhaps someone cast an Acquisition Spell on you, stealing it—now that’s a useful Spell, and an entertainingly mean thing to do).
There are only a few Talismans in the game; sometimes you can just find one on the ground, so to speak (i.e., one of the Adventure cards), but more likely you won it by completing a quest—visit the Warlock’s Cave, roll a die (yay!) to determine what the quest is; once you’ve done the indicated task (which could be to kill an enemy or simply to pay some Gold), you’re teleported back to the warlock and gifted a Talisman.
Once past the Valley of Fire, you enter the final space, the Crown of Command, and cast Command Spells (yes, more die rolling) on other characters until they have no Lives left, or until one catches up and battles you on the Crown of Command. And that’s it. Bit of an anticlimax, really. But then you were here mainly for the toading, anyway.
The end game improved a little with expansions.
Expansions
The first expansion, the imaginatively named Talisman: Expansion Set turned up in 1986, followed quickly by Talisman: The Adventure. These added a few more cards and characters, but the second also brought along half a dozen alternative endings to replace what happens in the Crown of Command. The most entertaining—or annoying if you’re the victim—was the Horrible Black Void, which resulted in the character being consigned to oblivion rather than getting the easy win the player had hoped for (and then a new ending card is selected for the next person to encounter).
The sixth and final official expansion, Talisman Dragons appeared in 1993, a while decade after the game’s launch, adding a range of powerful dragons and associated hangers on.
Between The Adventure and Dragons, other—more interesting—expansions added further game boards: a city, providing a maze of streets and shops where you can trade for useful items or take on careers to raise your stats; or a spiralling dungeon path full of monsters and wondrous treasure.
The wackiest of these expansions was Talisman Timescape which, out of nowhere, added a bunch of sci-fi content, with an incredibly bizarre time and space jumping mechanism. There was a hint of Warhammer 40,000 about it, as if Games Workshop was trying to smoosh both products together. I’ve no idea what its designer, Frank Borque, was smoking when he came up with the idea, and the rules leaflet seems to acknowledge that it’s a bit left-field in its opening sentence: ‘The Timescape consists of 15 alternate realities, separate but inexplicably tied to the world of Talisman’ [my emphasis]. But for all its ridiculousness, it was incredibly entertaining and something many fans have been asking for in later editions of Talisman (to no avail).
Incidentally, that Horrible Black Void I mentioned earlier—with this expansion, the void is just one way to enter the ‘timescape.’
What Came Next
Games Workshop burped out a third edition in 1994 with a bunch of changes. Gone was the inner region, replaced with the Wizard’s Tower, in which you drew cards instead of passing through space—it amounted to the same thing, I suppose, but somehow never felt as satisfying. The Strength point trading business was generalised into collecting Experience points, which could be traded in sevens for not just Strength, but also Craft or Lives. The most noticeable change, though, was switching the standees for plastic miniatures and many of the cardboard counters for plastic cones.
The fourth edition followed in 2007, but a couple of years after that, ownership was transferred to Fantasy Flight Games, and the Revised Fourth Edition dropped, with a few small changes. This version seems to be the definitive Talisman and the certainly the one blessed most expansions: fourteen, if my counting is correct—but no Timescape. Some of these added extra boards and some extra mechanisms, for example, day vs night in The Blood Moon such that enemies were stronger at nighttime than during the day; or Fate in the Woodlands, allowing you to reroll the die either for yourself or your opponents. (These mechanisms are actually pretty easy to make use of with any version of Talisman.) The Catalysm replaced the entire main board. The fourth edition also dispensed with Experience points, and brought back the inner region.
Today, we have the fifth edition courtesy of new owners Avalon Hill. Intended to be more friendly and streamlined, this removes all turn missing actions, and being toaded lasts only one turn instead of three and you get to keep all your stuff—that’s just not cricket! Still, house rules are your croaking friend here.
Wrap Up
Now in its fourth decade, Talisman has continued to be very popular, and while I have to admit that while the newest one is attractive, the fourth edition remains my favourite (primarily because of the range of expansions). However, the second has a certain charm, and there’s the attraction of the nonsense that is the Timescape.
For all that it’s a game relying almost entirely on luck, it seldom ceases to entertain, but that might just be all the toading.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
